Why You Should Invest In Female Artists Now
By: Tristan Post
Tags: Female Artists, Art Market, Art Investment, Art, Feminism

Jenny Saville’s Propped (1992) sold at Sotheby’s for $12.4 million; Sotheby’s

Female artists are the biggest bargain on the market! What will your art collection be worth?

That there are gender disparities, and a gender (pay) gap in the art market has been widely reported. The most expensive work ever sold by a female artist is Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower №1 (1932), which sold for $44.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2014. This amount is less than a tenth compared to the $450.3 million paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. Da Vinci’s painting in November 2017 shattered the record for the highest known price ever paid for a painting. With $44.4 million, O’Keefe’s art does not yet make it in the list of the 160 most expensive paintings, even when adjusted for inflation. Similarly, the highest price for a living female artist paid was set in 2018 by Jenny Saville’s Propped (1992), with $12.4 million. This price was a fraction of the $91.1 million paid for Jeff Koon’s Rabbit (1986), which sold at Christie’s in May last year.

Adams et al. wrote a joint paper in 2017 analysing 1.5 million auction transactions in 45 countries, documented a 47.6% discount for female artists in auction prices for paintings. Even when they adjusted the data set for outliers by removing the ‘superstar artists’ — works that sell above 1 million dollars — a discount factor of 28.8% remains (Adams, Kräussl, Navone, & Verwijmeren, 2017). Also, the Art Market Report 2019 highlights gender disparities all over the art market. Despite more women entering arts education and working as a visual artist, they are still vastly underrepresented in global exhibitions, as well as in galleries, collections, and at auctions. A recent study of artist diversity in museums in the U.S. concludes that out of over 10,000 artists, 87% are men, and of that total are 85% white (Topaz, et al., 2019).

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower №1 (1932) sold for $44.4 million at Sotheby’s in 2014; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2014.35

What explains the prevailing inequality that is demonstrated in the prices that artworks created by women can achieve? One hypothesis could be that art created by women is altogether of lesser quality. Therefore, these works sell at a lower price. Tylor Cowen calls this the genetic theory (Cowen, 1996). To make a comparison, this is similar to the biological belief that genetic gender differences are the primary factor influencing the top performances. The consequence being gaps in world records we observe between women and men in many competitive sports disciplines (Thibault, et al., 2010).

Cowen does not see the genetic hypothesis in the arts as entirely refuted. Moreover, he seriously doubts its validity as he observes artistic areas, such as in the needlework and embroidery arts, where the “achievements of women exceed the achievements of men”.

A more recent look at the genetic hypothesis comes from the same study that documented a 47.6% discount factor for a female artist. Setting up a simple experiment, Adams et al. showed survey participants paintings, asked them to guess the artist’s gender, and rate how much they liked the art on a scale from 1 to 10. As expected, participants were not able to systematically correctly infer the artist’s gender from the paintings. However, when they thought a female artist produced an art piece, they appreciated it less. This study makes it difficult to consider the genetic hypothesis as a possible explanation for the difference in prices we observe in the art market. Instead, this gives credibility to what Cowen calls the discrimination hypothesis. In this theory, social norms, gender bias, and culturally determined gender roles explain the different outcomes we observe in the art market.

That the discrimination hypothesis is more plausible is not a new idea. This premise has not only been highlighted in several papers (Nochlin, 1971) (Cowen, 1996) (Miller, 2016) but also by the National Museums of Women in the Arts, the feminist activist group Guerrilla Girls, or the #5WomenArtists social media campaign. Further evidence comes from a second experiment conducted by Adams et al., where they used the neural network algorithm of deepart.io to create computer-generated paintings. After randomly assigning those artificially generated paintings to fake female and male artists using phoney male and female names, they asked participants to rate the pictures. As before, the participants appreciated works less that were attributed with a fake female name. The authors see this as evidence that price differences are the outcome of a culture determined by gender roles and not biology.

Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still #21 (1978). Cindy Sherman is the highest-ranking female artist and ranks number 6 on Artfacts.net Top 100 Artists Alive; Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York

From this analysis, we can conclude that the difference in prices we observe for female artists stems not from biological factors. On the contrary, it can mainly be attributed to discrimination against women in our society and especially in this instance against the female artist in the art market. This conclusion in itself is very lamentable. While it is imperative to overcome such differences, it can be used, at least in theory, to guide the decision to invest in art successfully.

In a perfect world, i.e., a world where there is no gender bias and no discrimination exists, the art of equal quality should, on average, sell at the same price. In their research Adams et al. look at how gender inequality is related to gender discount factors. They conclude that the discount factor is higher in countries with greater gender inequality as measured by the United Nations Gender Inequality Index and the World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index. This conclusion suggests that in the real world, the higher the discrimination against women/female artists and the higher inequality between men and women in our society/art market, the higher the price difference should be.

One of the oldest and probably most famous pieces of advice for making money states “buy low, sell high”, and it applies to all kinds of investment. There seems to exist the possibility of buying art by female artists that are of equal, or of at least indiscernible quality as the art by male artists. However, at a considerably discounted price due to the gender gap. Maybe this is one of the reasons why Iwan Wirth, owner of one of the world’s most prominent art galleries Hauser and Wirth, called female artistic works the “biggest bargain of the century”. At the same time, we can observe all over the world and especially in the art market, a trend towards higher gender equality. The four most influential countries in terms of art sales volume — the U.S., the U.K., China, and France — show a clear downward trend in the UN’s Gender Inequality Index indicating that differences between men and women become smaller over the last decades and will most likely continue to decrease in the future.

Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy guerrillagirls.com

In recent years there has been a trend towards a more excellent representation of women and greater gender equality in the art world. The 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 achieved for the first time gender parity with 53% women artists, while in 2017, only 35% of solo participants were female, and in 2015 only 33%. In 2018, 40 of the 100 most influential people in the contemporary art world, according to ArtReview’s Power 100 list were women, compared to 38 in 2017 and 32 in 2016. Similarly, the Art Market Report 2019 using data from Artfacts.net shows substantial progress over time of women in global exhibitions, which grew from 4% in 1900 to 25% in 2000, and up to 33% in 2018. All these numbers show a clear trend towards higher gender equality, not to mention the increased awareness for gender discrimination in the art market thanks to ever more exhibitions and galleries focusing on female artists and to activist movements like the Guerrilla Girls. As it seems very likely that those trends will continue, the gender pay gap should diminish over the next years. Therefore, as long as the prices are considerably low, we can make use of those gender equalizing forces to invest now in female artists at a low price and sell high in the future.

Source: Art Agency, Partners Where Women Outpace Men in the Market

To the conclusion that investing in female artists is a smart thing to do also comes Sotheby’s Mei Moses Art Index. They state that works by female artists bought in 2012 and then sold in 2018 would, on average, have increased in value by 72.9%, clearly outperforming male artists.

Apart from the possibility of making sizeable profits, and increasing the worth of your art collection, when investing in female artists, there is another reason why you should invest now. You not only make use of the current gender gap to have higher returns. Also, investing sends a signal that supporting the female artist is the right thing to do. These circumstances will reinforce the confidence of investing in female artists, increasing the prices. This confidence should not only decrease the gender pay gap and but also help to make the art world an equal one. And to be honest it’s about time.