1y ago

Museum behind ladies-only art exhibit sued by man who was denied entry - National | Globalnews.ca

Not sure if this was already posted.

The article describes the referenced court case, and the artist's views and intentions.

Personally, I both loved and hated the idea at first. The more I think about it, the more I find it valuable in some way.

World News Non-US @lemy.lol

TVgog56789 @lemy.lol

1y ago

Museum behind ladies-only art exhibit sued by man who was denied entry - National | Globalnews.ca

globalnews.ca /news/10375175/ladies-lounge-mona-kirsha-kaechele-lawsuit-gender-discrimination-australia/

130 comments

Makes sense. Having a ladies only exhibit that only shows women artists is a positive thing. Not allowing certain visitors into a museum because of their gender is sexist.
- The museum this exhibit is at only allowed men until 1965. Today, there's a single, temporary exhibit within this museum that's only allowing women, with a stated intention to make people reflect on that previous time. That this single exhibit draws international attention speaks volumes to the reality of sexism in western society, and it's not the sexism you're talking about
  
  It wasn’t right in 1965, and it isn’t right today. Creating inverse discrimination to draw attention to historical discrimination is still a form of discrimination, even if it is temporary.
  This was just a poorly executed concept that could have been done better.
  
  Maybe the museum should take it up with the people still alive in 1965 who created the policy.
  The guy paid to be admitted and they took his money. He gets to see all the art. If they didn't want to let him see all the art they should have charged him nothing.
- Especially with the context that Australia didn’t allow women in pubs with men until 1965 so women there were literally sent to “ladies lounges,” which were apparently always some shitty side room, that sometimes would sell them a drink (at higher prices) while they waited.
  Turning that on its head as a temporary exhibit at a museum is clearly art to me. It’s not like she did it as a business concept to make money.
  
  If it's art, it's pretty childish art. "Revenge" is not useful nor healthy.
- So you feel like you are beeing treated sexist because of your gender.
  Wonderful. Now take that feeling. Feel the rage it brings with it, the exclusion, the pure UNFAIRNESS of it.
  And now think how often women experience this. Not on the context of "you may not enter" any more, but in hunders of other ways. You can't be good at math, you're a woman. Why wouldn't you want to stay with the kid for a year or so, you're a woman?!
  This is, so I belive, why the artist says the feeling of exclusion is the experience for male visitors she is intending. It gives you the possibility to think about how it feels beeing female in a world that is still very much male dominated (tough in a slightly more subtle way than in 1965).
  
  I’m not feeling anything personally because I didn’t go to the art exhibit—I’m just a person reading news stories on Lemmy.
  I have been discriminated against for my gender, race, and sexual orientation before. It’s humiliating. I imagine I would also feel a bit humiliated at being turned away from a museum due to my gender.
  In general, making people feel like shit for who they are has no positive function in any public space, and I’d prefer it if we simply left those behaviors in the past entirely.
  
  Did this ticket holder consent to this? Yes or no?
  
  Thanks for proving my point that modern feminists don't want equality or even equity; they want superiority.
  They think it's "their turn" to be the abusers and that the world owes it to them.
Kaechele’s husband, David Walsh, founded and owns the MONA.
The artist is lambasting exclusive Mens social clubs
Exclusive men’s social clubs have existed all over the world, including Canada, and particularly thrived in the 19th century. These exclusionary clubs often only accepted white members and barred women from entering the space, apart from when in service roles.
But if she was doing that truly, then it should have been only available to minority women. But she didn't. She also ignores there are a lot of women only exclusive clubs too, just ask any male victim of sexual assault looking for a support group.
This isn't some groundbreaking work, it's just sexist. The artist is tedious.
- Isn't that the art piece? That it's being sexist in a way that's impacted women... But in a way that's obvious to men? Yeah it's clearly sexist. That's messed up. That's the point.
  True that it doesn't mention the sexiest things that affect men and other women. But not every art piece has to capture every element of the human experience. This was focused on one point.
I mean, how would people react to a male-only art exhibit?
- Didn't a couple of people mention that was all of it before a certain year?
  I also had no idea museums might have had gender restrictions.
  
  Didn’t a couple of people mention that was all of it before a certain year?
  I don't know, did they? Also, why would that matter?
- Probably the same way that they do for all of the gentlemen clubs around the world. They wouldn’t care because society is hypocritical. It’s fine for men to do it but the second they are excluded from something it’s not acceptable.
  To clarify my standing I think they are both sexist and dumb. If you are going to criticize one then you need to be critical of the other.
  
  What gentlemen’s club takes money from women and then denies them entry?
  Therein lies the problem. They want a woman-only exhibit, then they need to deny men admission from the museum in entirety. But that would probably be detrimental to the museum’s bottom line. But you can’t take money from men and then deny equal access, nor can you do it to women.
  
  There is a difference between a social club and art exhibition. If this was a social group that organised their own internal art exhibition than more power to them.
- That's a very naive equivalence
  
  I'm guessing you support double-standards?
men are certainly experiencing the artwork as it’s intended
Perhaps that is the intent of the curator, but what evidence is there this is what the artists intended. Picasso write somewhere “I only want the ladies to see this one?”
It’s a dumb approach that will not make the point the curator thinks it will make. And I bet that person would be pissed if there were a male-only exhibit.
Exclusive men’s social clubs have existed all over the world, including Canada and particularly thrived in the 19th century. These exclusionary clubs often only accepted white members and barred women from entering the space,
And those clubs didn’t deny women access after they paid for admission
- Also, how can you justify doing something that's objectively wrong just because someone else did it first?
  
  2 wrongs makes a right these days. Just yesterday I saw someone on this site gush and defend Rittenhouse because one of the guys he shot was a criminal
In his complaint, Lau argued it is discriminatory to keep artwork, like that of the Picasso painting displayed exclusively in the Ladies Lounge, away from he and other men who pay to enter the museum. (...) He’s asked for an apology from the museum and for men to either be allowed into the lounge or permitted to pay a discounted ticket price for the museum.
Kaechele and lawyers for the MONA rebutted by saying the exclusion of men is the point of the Ladies Lounge exhibit. “The men are experiencing Ladies Lounge, their experience of rejection is the artwork,” Kaechele told the Guardian. “OK, they experience the artwork differently than women, but men are certainly experiencing the artwork as it’s intended.”
This is going to be much trickier than it seems based only on the headline. Both anti-discrimination laws and the freedom of art are very fundamental rights, and a decision that weighs these against each other will not be easy to reach (at least I would think so). Curious to see how this lands, although I expect that the museum will come out on top, because the disadvantage that this special exhibit poses to the man (the museum would even argue there is none) is probably not big or permanent enough to justify a restriction on the freedom of art as big as this would entail (and I guess the museum probably discussed this with their lawyer beforehand).
- I disagree, I think it's pretty clearcut discrimination. The museum has to give men the same treatment as the women when they buy the same ticket, and if they buy different tickets then the men need to be given the option to buy a women's ticket. Only in that last circumstance could this have any chance in court against a discrimination lawsuit.
- This reminds me of the "Nathan for you" episode where he turns a bar into a "live theatrical performance" so patrons could smoke as a loop hole.
  But honestly, the freedom of speech / claiming "art" stops applying when you're doing something else illegal (threats of violence, slander, csam). Why would this be any different?
- “The men are experiencing Ladies Lounge, their experience of rejection is the artwork,” Kaechele told the Guardian.
  This is so interesting. I interpret this to mean that having a man sue them for discrimination could also be considered part of the experience of the artwork. It is very clever and very modern, and also good media exposure. It reminds me of when Banksy sold a piece of art at auction and the frame was a disguised paper shredder that shredded the artwork immediately after it was bought. I hope the media continues to cover this story to see if the artist/museum reveals that being sued for discrimination was their intention all along.
Is sexist trolling art now? I prefer the toilet
Performance art is wild, often misunderstood. The entire point is to outrage men and he took the bait lol. The artist is clearly getting off on this, staging shit in even more locations because of the lawsuit.
- So sexism is outrage performance art now?
  
  It is when it's against men
  
  All Cops Are Artists?
  
  You're the artist's target, and you're literally performing in her exhibit right now
  
  Men like this always deliberately misunderstand because they are addicted to outrage and misogyny.
- Weird. I can easily see someone doing the same thing but banning women and you wouldn't say "they took the bait" when women get mad about it.
  
  Then you’d miss the entire point
- When did trolling become a profession? I am not a particularly good artist but I still enjoy making stuff for people and knowing that they are happy with what I make.
  
  Art has bordered on what you’d call “trolling” for a while. Someone else in the comments referenced Duchamp’s Fountains
- I hope the court room shenanigans don't actually distract from the validity. People tend to get distracted easily from thinking about something challenging.
To be fair, there's a difference between the lounge itself being the exhibit, vs restricting some of Picasso's pieces
- Why? Woman habe been restriced from artwork (and jobs, voting rights,...) for generations.
  If the point is to give male persons the possibility to feal this exclusion, then it makes sense to exclude something from them that they actually would like to see.
- Once I read that the lounge and reaction to it is supposed to be the art itself, it kinda made sense. In a weird way, but it still kinda makes sense.
ITT: some angry ass men who have missed the point. Lol.
- Weird how sexism is okay if it's against men.
  Would you have the same reaction if women got mad about being banned from an art exhibit?
  
  Not if it was an exhibit about misogyny...
  You are so eager to be a victim you have deliberately missed the point. Poor men.
- It is a stupid point, and hardly art, but even you should be able to understand it by now if you read the other comments come on
- Fuck the point.
- What’s the point?
  
  To be sexist.
  Some people feel others need to be sexually discriminated against because apparently this will achieve something useful?
  
  it's paragraph 3 in the article.
- What’s weird is that this comment was well upvoted yesterday. I think this thread is being brigaded. At least one account was made just to comment on this thread
  
  I'm glad there's so many chuds going to so much effort to prove the artist correct, lol.
Personally, I both loved and hated the idea at first. The more I think about it, the more I find it valuable in some way.
Thanks you for saying so and spending time thinking about this. The way I see things, the point here is to take a glance at how systemic sexism works through an art exhibit. That is, if you dare.
Other examples that would illustrate what I mean in relation to systemic sexism, would be:
It is not sexism if a dude is not allowed in a lesbian bar. They are a minority group, and just want to do their thing.
It is sexism when a woman is refused to apply for a grandmaster chess tournament because of tradition/culture/etc. ~~We live in a world that women are still not allowed participate in these tournaments.~~
[edit: the strikethrough, cause apparently it's not the case. There are women tournaments (only for women) and open ones (open to all). I think the example still stands, as an illustration to what I meant]
- Women aren't barred from joining chess tournaments. They have their own tournaments where men are not allowed. They don't join "grandmaster level tournaments" whatever that means because they don't have a high enough rating to compete. Reasons for this are complicated and largely unknown, with the main possible reason being they probably get less support worldwide for pursuing chess. Also there are titles that require less ELO points to qualify for, made for women, like "woman master".
  
  Why are men and women playing chess in different leagues? Chess isn't atheltic, nobody is going to have an advantage over another player because of gender or sex.
  
  Reasons for this are complicated and largely unknown
  Really?
  Well, systemic sexism is complicated, no doubt. You have to decide tho. Complicated or unknown? Cause it can't be both.
- When I first read it, the thought that came to mind was how stupid it is in this age to do anything that is restricted by gender when the rest of the world is trying to eliminate that.
  Once I read the part about the feelings, emotion, and experience the restriction brought was the actual art and not just the paintings, that's when I thought it was clever. The definition of art seems to be ambiguous now, but I understand what she's trying to to do and it's still a clever in that it illicits an effect whether you wanted to visit the museum or not.
  I think people say they understand or empathize, but don't really know what it means in a specific context until they experience it IMO.
I've got a great idea for an exhibit to teach men about rape.
- Die in a fire.
  
  Oh I'm sorry, are you not in favour of forcing people to experience things they know are wrong because how else would they know it's wrong unless we inflict it on them?
  If you agree with the gallery and artists intentions, surely you must agree with me applying the same logic to other social issues.

130 comments