Hello everyone! My name is Michelle Marcelline but you can call me Michelle, and my preferred pronoun is she/her. I am a junior majoring in Financial Actuarial Mathematics with a specialization in Computing. I was born and raised in Indonesia, a developing country in Southeast Asia. As a Chinese Indonesian, I have not been exposed to many things so moving to the United States and studying in UCLA has been a big step in my life. I want to make use of this opportunity to study different cultures and subjects that are not related to my major to expand my knowledge not just in Science, but also in Arts.
The in-class exercise we had on Tuesday made me realize that great artists are mostly men. This is proven by the number of male artists we managed to list, 69, versus the number of female artists we listed, 57. This fact is then explained by Nochlin through the essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”. The essay discusses this question from an extremely sexist point of view, “human beings with wombs are unable to create anything significant”, to a feminist point of view, “women create a different kind of great art”. The conclusion of this essay is that women have not been great in art because of lack of opportunities for women in art: established artists tend to look for men apprentices, only males in the family were taught art, some women were able to study art but they must come from an extremely wealthy family. Moreover, those women can only study art as a hobby and not as a profession. So, there have been no great women artists due to institutional, not individual reasons.
This essay caught my attention because I don’t think that gender limits one’s desired profession. Every profession should have an equal opportunity for both genders and they must perform an equal effort in order to achieve it.
No comments:
Post a Comment