The Benefit of Art: Post Feminist Positions of the Nineties

Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? feminist art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked in 1988. It's a rhetorical question that fortunately needn't be asked in the 90s, a decade that produced at least as much great art by women as by artists of any other gender. Primarily devoted to the positions of these young European and American women art makers, The Benefit of Art displays sketches and paintings, photographic works, videos, and installations by Matthew Barney, Rineke Dijkstra, Tracey Emin, Mona Hatoum, Jonathan Horowitz, Sarah Jones, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Moffatt, Cady Noland, Catherine Opie, Pipilotti Rist, Daniela Rossell, Cindy Sherman, Ann-Sofi Sid n, Sam Taylor-Wood, Gillian Wearing, Sue Williams, and Andrea Zittel. Concentrating on developments in the art of the 90s that have been classified as postfeminist, this book asks whether, and to what degree, the concept itself is useful and applicable. The larger context concerns the state of feminism, one of the most incisive social developments of the 20th century, which saw its traditional, emancipatory approach undergo a reworking in the artistic discourse of a younger generation, whose self-confident inquiries, as personal as they are sociological, evolved from feminist criticism to gender studies.