The Guerrilla Girls at the Feminist Future Symposium, MoMA

0 Responses to The Guerrilla Girls at the Feminist Future Symposium, MoMA

1. neworleansbearcub says:

   July 10, 2007 at 8:36 pm

   Who are the consumers of museum art, and who are the producers? I would imagine that 50% of art is”produced”by women. I would also suspect that the consumers [i.e. donors], are likely to overwhelmingly male. To the extent that running a business [like a museum] requires keeping the customers [i.e. the donors] happy, the business will need to cater to its customer’s tastes.

   For an interesting analogous story concerning minorities in baseball, please see the following from Greg Mankiw’s blog at http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/search?q=baseball

   “Studies of sports teams suggest that racial discrimination is, in fact, common and that much of the blame lies with customers. One study, published in the Journal of Labor Economics in 1988, examined the salaries of basketball players. It found that black players earned 20 percent less than white players of comparable ability. The study also found that attendance at basketball games was larger for teams with a greater proportion of white players. One interpretation of these facts is that, at least at the time of the study, customer discrimination made black players less profitable than white players for team owners. In the presence of such customer discrimination, a discriminatory wage gap can persist, even if team owners care only about profit.”