Credit: Dangerous Minds / MONA Gallery

The art world, like most things, is a boy’s club.

It’s a tale as old as time in almost every cultural medium, from art to cooking to music. It starts out as an unmasculine pursuit, so it’s mainly done by women. Said pursuit gets disrespected and pilloried for its perceived femininity until it invariably starts inspiring men to do it too. Then, that’s when the pursuit starts being respected, and people start getting paid for it. Then, it becomes a manly pursuit and, well, you can’t have women doing manly pursuits, can you?

Any attempt to make this world more accessible to people who would otherwise be excluded by it should be welcomed, right? Well, in an ideal world, that should be the case. As you’ve no doubt noticed, though, we don’t live in an ideal world. In fact, quite the opposite. Most attempts at righting these historical wrongs come out as confused platitudes that are, at best, naïve and, at worst, outright exclusionary. Few things illustrate that with as much forehead-slapping stupidity as Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art, otherwise known as the MONA.

The story begins in 2020, when the MONA announced a new exhibition called the Ladies Lounge, a part of the museum styled as a decadent boudoir only accessible to women. The space held many of the museum’s most prized possessions, including a set of paintings by Pablo Picasso that MONA had recently acquired.

Remember those Picassos, they’ll be important later.

What went wrong with this art gallery?

The Ladies Lounge was the brainchild of Kirsha Kaechele, an artist, curator and the wife of the MONA’s owner David Walsh. On the one hand, it does have an appeal. As mentioned previously, the industry has been a boy’s club for too long, and part of the art was replicating that exclusion, but for men. However, things got complicated in 2023 when a male patron of the museum sued the museum for barring him from entering the lounge.

The suit was upheld in an Australian court, and, rather than actually open up the lounge to people who aren’t women, the museum closed as they figure out what to do next. Here’s where things get intensely stupid. Kaechele’s genius solution was to move the Picasso paintings, priceless works by one of the greatest to ever hold a brush, into the ladies’ toilet. This disrespect of some of the great works of our time made international headlines, and then the penny dropped.

The newfound attention put newfound scrutiny on the works exhibited and, before anyone could find out themselves, Kaechele spilt the tea on a masturbatory, self-congratulating blog post that’s mainly about how incredible an artist she is. The Picassos weren’t Picassos, and she’d painted them all herself. In fact, none of the exhibits in the Ladies Lounge were authentic, all of them were copies of existing work or just junk Kaechele had found that fit the desired aesthetic.

Eventually, a separate court ruled that the exhibit committed in the name of so-called progress could go on, so long as there was a way for some men to take part in it. Kaechele, in true insufferable fashion, threw a month-long champagne cocktail party to celebrate the fact that she, too, was now rich and influential enough to gatekeep the things that make life worth living from people who want to see it. Sort of. After all, the ruling did mean she now had to have a way for at least some men to see the show.

However, why admit defeat when you could go on splurging hundreds of thousands of dollars for extravagant parties for you and your rich friends? Which is all this little charade proves, doesn’t it? Not that women now hold any meaningful power in the art industry, just the ones married to the people who already had it in the first place.

That’s not progress or praxis. No matter what anyone might tell you.