I liked our reading this week. Two women who really seem to know what’s up. Not gonna lie, I tend to favor all those feminist women out there who recognize that men do in fact run our society, and try to do something to change that. The Guerrilla Girls are doing that in the best possible way I think-with humor and without any personal gain. They aren’t doing it to be cool, only so out society can move in the right direction. I do appreciate them, I really do, but the act of practicing what they do myself tends to be a hazy subject for me. I can never decide if I should do something about how i feel. By not doing anything, I feel like I’m not giving men the satisfaction of recognizing that they have the upper hand. But on the other side of the picture I feel like i should do something because it’s obviously corrupt. I try to find a balance somewhere in between. I try not to let the fact that I am a woman define who I am as an artist or the opinions that I have and I really try to call someone out when they say something sexist. We are all just people, and sometimes I feel like bringing any attention to the subject is only making things worse. Take this whole Whitney Biennial thing that Suzi Gablik likes to talk about so much- when the museum made an obvious effort to only include artists of minorities in the show, doesn’t that just isolate them more? Sometimes I feel like we are at the point in our society where it’s time to let go of this whole effort to incorporate minorities as equals because it’s only making it worse! Can’t we all just be judged and thought of as people and artists rather than male, female, black, white, ect? It reminds me of a job application that I was filling out this summer. There was a slip of paper inside of the application that was talking about how the company isn’t discriminatory when hiring based off our sex or race, and it goes on about how important this is…then underneath all this there were ten or so boxes asking me to identify what race I was! It made me so angry. Why do you even need to know if you aren’t hiring based off of it? I think once we stop recognizing race, this is when we can move forward.

Mary Jane Jacob was semi-interesting to read about. But honestly, I feel like she didn’t say anything I haven’t heard before. More stuff about how the gallery system is flawed and art can be participatory too. Well duh. Why is this such an issue? All these different opinions on what art should be… I personally believe art can be ANYTHING. Anything at all. Whatever works for the artist. So it’s cool if people want to give their art a message, have the community make it together, not give their art a message, it can be messy or simple, take years or minutes…doesn’t matter. Put it in a gallery, don’t put it in a gallery, different strokes for different folks. I may not personally like all of it, but I believe that everyone has the right to create whatever they please. Can we just stop arguing about it?