Let’s Talk: Tyler Cowen and the Study of Women in the Arts

This is a first of a series profiling George Mason professors and their current and/or past work.

Professor Tyler Cowen (photo courtesy of George Mason University).

George Mason professor Tyler Cowen explores and discusses why women’s role in the arts has changed over time.

This month is, among many other things, National Women of Achievement Month. Today, women appear to be a rising majority in the arts world, especially in the performing arts.

This was not always the case. Until the 21st century, women were minority in the arts, especially in visual arts. “Why Women Succeed, and Fail, in the Arts” by Professor Tyler , published  in the Journal of Cultural Economics in 1996 by Kluwar Academic Publishers analyzes and attempts to explain this trend in visual art through the lens of an economist.

His interest in the topic sparked from his role as an art enthusiast.

“If you look around my office, you see a lot of artwork. I’m very closely connected with art markets and the art world partly as a buyer and to a lesser extent as a supporter of artists,” Professor Cowen said. “So you notice certain patterns in art and there are some fields of art such as textiles or outsider art or naïve art where women are very prominent. There are other fields of art where women seem much less prominent and you see this regularity and you ask as an economist, ‘Can, in some way, economic tools make sense of this?’”

Cowen explores four popular hypotheses that try to explain woman’s apparent inferiority in the arts which he labels as genetic, discrimination, maternal obstacles, and parity.

As Professor Cowen’s work suggests, women’s success or failure in the arts during earlier periods of history seem easily explained by the economic culture of the time.

In early history including the Rennaissance and the Baroque period, women who had supportive families, especially those with artistic fathers, were the only ones with even a chance to pursue the arts based both on the education and fiscal support she could receive. Even those who had rich families were usually unable to pursue the arts because art education for females rested solely in the home, and those who went to school for their education, like Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, risked the chance of ridicule and rape at the hands of their teachers and fellow students.

The types of artwork that women did succeed in were ones that did not require training or, like Naïve art, depend upon an untrained hand.

Now, however, women dominate the artistic world.

 “Environmental factors are very, very important,” Cowen said. “I think you see that mirrored in the most recent shift so you have many more women creators. I think part of this [shift comes from women] becoming more educated and having a chance to earn more, but a bigger part is just the number of children families have been having has been falling.”

 With fewer children and more opportunities for education, women have been given the freedom to grow as artists and meet or exceed the standards set up by the male artists who came to the field before them.

The article argues that given the same opportunities as men, women are just as likely to succeed as their male counterparts. Women, in fact, seem to dominate in photography. As Cowen briefly brings up in his paper, photography is a newer art form, and when it began there was no previous experience with it. Therefore, women and men were at an equal level to improve upon and learn new skills with the camera, unlike other, earlier art forms.

Success in the arts relies not only on talent, but on education, time, and outside support.

For more information about Tyler Cowen visit his personal page, or visit here to learn more about his latest book “Average is Over”