Why are all the blockbuster art shows by men?





Damien Hirst, Lucian Freud, David Hockney ... they may be very different artists but they have something in common, apart from the fact that all have blockbuster exhibitions this spring. A certain universality and ambition, an ability to voice the experience of Everyman ... Wait a moment. Yes, it is Everyman. After all the revolutions in art over the last couple of centuries, the gender bias is apparently as deep as ever.

This year – quite apart from the Cultural Olympiad that will foreground artists like, er, Mr Anish Kapoor and Mr Martin Creed – a crop of big exhibitions are focusing not so much on the diversity and energy of British art as on the greats, the big boys ... and boys they are. Women play a big part in modern British art. But when it comes to awarding the gold, silver and bronze medals the idea of excellence in art remains as macho as it was in the days of Michelangelo, Rodin, Rothko. Why is that?

Oddly enough, the only blockbuster British art star of this season who is not a man is Gillian Wearing, showing at the Whitechapel Gallery, whose director Iwona Blazwick is also a woman. Is there a male conspiracy elsewhere? I think it is more that ideas of greatness in art are so steeped in centuries of sexism that their effect is as hard to pin down as it is vicious. Women are judged differently.

Rachel Whiteread has earned the right to be seen as an important artist as much as anyone of her generation but when she competed for the commission to design the "Angel of the South" at Ebbsfleet no one said she should get it on that score. Somehow she did not deserve star status, did not deserve to be taken seriously. A man got the job, and his project turned out to be impractically expensive.

Whiteread is one of the women who easily deserved one of this year's grand retrospectives. As it happens she has got a Cultural Olympiad commission ... at Blazwick's Whitechapel Gallery, funnily enough. Bridget Riley wowed visitors to the National Gallery recently – why not a Tate blockbuster for this great British modern artist? Then there is Sarah Lucas, a genius among modern sculptors. Somehow, when it comes to the glittering prizes, women artists are still being relegated to also-rans.