It’s strange, in the years of Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer changing comedy, and Tina Fey making room in TV, and Hillary Clinton making her cicada-like, quadrennial return, to pan the camera across the rigid men’s club of the arts. From the Chelsea galleries to the spring and fall auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s (which offer the gender composition of a pro football team) to the museums where schoolchildren walk hesitantly on field trips to see the visual products the culture has treasured. Where every other aspect of American life has changed, the Art World offers this wonderful scientific breakthrough of time travel.

Pat Lipsky, writing in The Awl about the difficulty of being a woman in the art world. Lipsky’s essay, which draws on her personal experiences as an artist coming of age in the ’60s, is beautiful, vivid, and deeply depressing.

Read the story