For every £1 fetched by a male artist’s work, one by a woman gets a mere 10p – and its value plummets further if she signs it. The creator of Recalculating Art, a shocking new radio exposé, reveals her findings
Are men 10 times better at painting than women? You might think so if you listened to the German artist Georg Baselitz, who famously told the Guardian in 2015 that “women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact. The market doesn’t lie.”
The market may not be deliberately deceiving us but it certainly gives the impression that male artists are much better than female ones. The most expensive painting ever sold – Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci – fetched $450m while the world record for a female artist, Georgia O’Keeffe, is just $44.4m, a tenth as much.
