Linda Nochlin speaks on behalf of women and muses with admirable restraint on the absence of great female artists in the history of art. Obviously, plenty of social and political factors worked in favor of providing men with the necessary freedom to create and epitomize artistic movements. But a biological factor is likely part of the answer, and I can suggest this without flattery. Psychologists know that men are less balanced, more likely to develop into either dullards or “geniuses” — this last word I hesitate to use, for what passes for genius is really the spark of madness, a demonic energy one sees in Hamlet (the genius?) and Romeo (the idiot?) — an energy that does not hesitate to sacrifice everything: family, aristocracy, security and life itself in the quest for new, more electric forms of expression.
But art movements are a historical, evolutionary phenomenon, and when their trajectory is complete, the world will have little use for that spark of madness, for then madness will have been normalized, incorporated, digested. The arts will hardly be recognizable, as they will have become integral to society, synonymous with balance, and understood by all as a necessary means to maintaining a healthy, nearly effortless social and psychological balance.
Until that time, one might perhaps say to the feminist academic: Why do you speak so calmly and reasonably? Who enslaved your pen to the boring, dispassionate voice of male-dominated academia and financial security? Who gave you the amazing sense of irresponsible contentment to speak about the absence of great women artists instead of heeding the call to become a great artist? We all have that responsibility, and humility absolves no one.
And this I also believe to be true: A few brave men sacrificed their comfort and their lives for half an inch of intellectual and aesthetic progress and evolution — but we who follow after them, with relative ease we reap the reward and harvest the fruit of the garden they fought to create. And when that garden is complete, then all our” insane” and seemingly insatiable yearning for more stimulating forms of expression will be sated by the crowning movement, and we shall have no more need of sacrificial lambs and lions.
