"The false idea is that there really is such a thing as feminist art, as opposed to art that intentionally or by osmosis reflects or is influenced by feminist thought, of which there is plenty," doesn't make sense.

Someone help me out. So there is no such thing as feminist art? So feminism is a category separate and distinct from feminist? So, if you don't declare yourself a feminist, then you cannot do feminist art, except by osmosis? Let's see. In addition to feminist Judy Chicago we have, by osmosis, artists such as Georgia O'Keefe, Eva Hesse, Frida Kahlo, Helen Frankenthaler, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Louise Nevelson, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sarah Sze, Barbara Kruger, Diane Arbus, Guerrilla Girls, Cindy Sherman, Ida Applebroog, Marisol, Nancy Graves, Hannah Wilke, Maya Lin, Jenny Holzer, all of which demonstate an unbelievably osmotic leaning towards ideas and issues directly related to women.

Jeez, I'm only leaving out about a hundred others who have left a permanent mark on twentieth century art and feminist thought.

In any case, I'm really glad to see the new center.

This is soooo exciting! When I go to Washington DC I always visit the National Museum of Women Artists and saw an amazing exhibit on feminist art a few years ago so I can't wait to see what the Bklyn Museum has in store for us.

i personally liked "Study “The Dinner Party� close enough and your bra, if you’re wearing one, may spontaneously combust."

obviously, anyone can now review art for the new york times.

another good line: "The word feminism will be around as long as it is necessary for women to put a name on the sense of assertiveness, confidence and equality that, unnamed, has always been granted men."

i've tended to refer to it as "male privelege", or alternately, "the patriarchy".

the museum sounds fantastic tho, even with all this writers condescending snobbery the descriptions of the art still made me want to go. wish i werent stuck amidst soybean fields here in the midwest.

Yes, the review is horrible - and gratuitously so. I'm kind of shocked.

But I have to say it's really refreshing to see a detail shot of "The Dinner Party" in the New York Times. This was the show that was so controversial several museums closed their exhibition even though the public clamored to get in. Now it's right on the page of a public newspaper. So maybe there's some progress (or maybe the Times editors are just too clueless to notice what they were printing).

The NYT review is high-handed and smacks of rude post-feminist shame, but it's not without good points, things that trouble me about this show/center.

The problem with the label of "feminist art" is that it tends to do what feminist art theoretically fights against - the ghettoizing of women artists as women artists rather than artists who make work concerning being a woman/feminism/the female body.

Feminist art doesn't exist as a true "genre" because the artists encompassed in the show are from completely different schools of thought, media, generations, methodologies. While I think it's great, and challenging, to try and assemble a group show about "global feminisms," claiming that these women belong together more than, say, Diane Arbus belongs with Garry Winogrand, is not only ridiculous, but disempowering. For better or for worse, curatorial decision-making is largely made around aesthetic genres, not political ones, and to make an exception for a fuzzy definition of "feminist art" diminishes the works' importance. I'll judge the worth of the center by the kind of exhibits it stages over the next several years - whether it can view "feminist art" in a way that's flexible and challenging, or a retrograde straitjacket.

Might I interject with a shameless endorsement of "Bitch" magazine's treatment of "The Dinner Party" and the opening of the museum in this month's issue ("The Super Issue").

And ...

But feminism is not a style, or a formal approach. It is a philosophy, an attitude and a political instrument ... In addition feminism is not of itself an aesthetic value. It is an idea that can assume an organic force in some artists’ work, but others just pay it lip service without much exertion or passion.

This seems to be the writer's main beef with the museum: it ties together a mishmash of art philosophies and movements without unifying them under a stylistic umbrella. The thing that ties them together is an amorphous and nontraditional set of criteria defined by the curators.

The neat thing about feminism, y'see, is that it forces you to examine and re-define the boxes imposed by patriarchy, including "official" art movements, and the ubiquity of boobies; apparently, by the way, it's okay to display art with naked women all over the place when you're in a classical art museum, but their presence becomes tiringly ubiquitous in a feminist context. I don't think the writer gets it. Even a half-assed approach to feminism (and who, by the way, gets to define what is lip service and what is genuine) sparks thought and discussion, which is what good art will do.

Time's coverage was less" silly girlz" does this particular piece of art hold up when compared to other pieces of feminist art"...and there isn't any question the concept of the feminist genre, which is pretty cool coming from a male writer...

If you came to the exhibition this weekend, you probably missed our comment kiosk. It's easily missed behind a shopping rack in the exhibition's shop ;(

In the next week or so, we will be fixing this situation, but in the meantime, if you saw the show, we'd like to know what you think! Comments can be made right from our Web site: www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/comment/exhibition.php?id=1

The one thing I'll say about the exhibit is that, boy does it show that "feminisms" is plural. There were all kinds of ideas of what feminism is about, and that's a good thing. I will say, though, that when they warn you about "graphic images," the snarky review had primed me to expect "graphic" to mean lots of nudity, which there was, not lots of violence, which was also very prevalent. Unfortunately, the number of times you turned a corner to find another difficult-thing-to-watch eventually made me scared to keep looking at anything, and overshadowed some of the other art (since your eye is drawn to the sensational images). I'm not saying there's no place for violence in art, just that by the end I was cringing at everything (after the barbed wire hula hoop, and the hour-long video performance during which duct tape is applied to and removed from the breasts repeatedly until they are raw and bright red). There were lots of other interesting ideas represented, and I'm not sure how the exhibit could have been organized more successfully to avoid either bowdlerizing feminist art or segregating the different kinds of feminism into "acceptable/nonacceptable."

Hey! I was a Dinner Party Project worker bee volunteer! I'm really excited to see this art has a permanent home, and can't wait to make a trip to Brooklyn to see it again; I last saw it when it visited the UCLA Hammer in L.A. Being involved with the Project was an amazing experience, and it was wonderful of Judy Chicago to invite participation.

I have a question for you, Susan! my companions at the dinner party wanted to know whether the tiles were painted with the names before or after they were grouted in--and how does that huge tile floor come apart for packing up, anyway?

Hmmm. I remember reading about Dinner Party in a rhetoric text book and wishing I could see it. I really should have gone to an East Coast School.

Also, regarding "feminism is not a style, or a formal approach" etc., I think that it's perfectly appropriate to put artwork together by subject matter. For example, in a museum in Naples (I can't remember which one), there's a "Closet Secret" that houses ancient "pornography" regardless of whether it's Roman or Greek, or whether it actually is pornography, or just erotic religious work. There's also a lot of exhibits I've seen for a particular subject (the strangest I've seen was a collection of paintings of irises). Why not art about feminism, or about women?

Guess who moved to Brooklyn a month ago? That's right.

I don't see anything wrong either with grouping artwork by the subject matter it treats. I mean, I'm not a curator; maybe museums look weird without some kind of unifying aesthetic. Whatever.

Regardless, I'll be checking this out soon.

"and the hour-long video performance during which duct tape is applied to and removed from the breasts repeatedly until they are raw and bright red"

oh god no way ugh

Ok, so not that I WANT to be defending Roberta Smith and her categorization, but the problem may be that she's talking about genres in the art world and we're more likely to talk about feminism as a genre outside the art world. Is feminism a style of art like Impressionism or Cubism, or whatever? No: as even Smith says, feminism is much, much bigger and more complex than that. (I'm not sure we'd even WANT feminism to be a style of art: wouldn't that be limiting?) I think what she means is that "feminist" art does not mean a recognizable single style or look, nor is it done by a single group of people in a single area of the world. Unlike Impressionism, where all the artists were getting together regularly and directly borrowing from one another, the impression the Global Feminisms exhibit gives is of a bunch of women all over the world doing thinigs that do relate to each other in some ways but are also very independent, and concerned with very different things. Does the fact that feminist art may not be "style" mean that an exhibit of feminist art is not useful or revelatory or that there is no space in an art museum for it? Not at all! I'm actually excited by the idea that the exhibit is almost more political than it is artistic/aesthetic. I want to see new museums devoted to all kinds of radical political ideas and issues! but that's just me.

Louise:

I have a question for you, Susan! my companions at the dinner party wanted to know whether the tiles were painted with the names before or after they were grouted in--and how does that huge tile floor come apart for packing up, anyway?

Hi Louise! My recollection is that the names were all arranged on a huge piece of paper the size of the floor, and then transferred to the tiles in sections. I remember Judy planned everything to death and was extremely methodical, a very meticulous artist-- which was an important trait I think when there were so many people helping.

I know the floor is in sections, but I'm not sure how big they are-- maybe two feet or so to a side? My Dinner Party book is around here somewhere, and I could look it up for you. I sort of remember a picture in that book of some people working on the floor.

I wish I'd taken advantage of the opportunity to actually contribute to the stitching part of the piece-- but I was too afraid I'd ruin anything I touched, so I volunteered answering phones and mail and doing office work instead. It was wonderful just being in that environment, though-- my first big-city exposure to a passel of artists and lesbians! There were a couple hundred of us volunteers and only a few were male, so you can imagine the ambiance.