According to a 2014 museum visit survey, the world’s most popular artist is a woman – Yayoi Kusama from Japan.
However, a survey of solo shows in American galleries over the past six years found that 73% were by male artists.
A report in Art Newspaper found that Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns each had seven exhibitions during the reporting period. The artist with the most exhibitions was Kara Walker, who had four.
However, as Kusama’s success shows, the audience is not biased towards female artists. The second most popular solo show in the six years was Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at MoMA in New York. An average of 7,120 visitors per day came to see Abramovic, among others, who was sitting motionless in the gallery.
It was only beaten by the sculptor Richard Serra, whose memorial sculptures in 2007 attracted 8,585 visitors to the MoMA every day.
Swiss (and female) artist Pipilotti Rist had the fourth most popular solo show of the time, despite the conventional wisdom that only big names attract crowds. Their installation at MoMA, which featured 17 of the 20 most popular exhibitions of the six-year period, drew 6,186 visitors a day.
The art newspaper found that male artists represented by the world’s largest art dealers are more than seven times more likely to receive a solo exhibition than female artists who are under contract with the same top gallery owners such as Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner.
With this in mind, Kusama’s 2014 success looks even more remarkable. The 86-year-old artist, who has volunteered in a Tokyo psychiatric facility since 1977, drew over 2 million people across South and Central America to a retrospective of her famous polka dot and mirror installations.
A second retrospective is currently being shown in Taiwan on the way to New Delhi. Not only is Kusama a key figure in pop art and the avant-garde, whose work included sexually charged events and 18 novels, but he also suggests Art Newspaper, “the figurehead for the globalization of contemporary art”.
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