A Frida Kahlo painting is going up for auction. El sueño (La cama). A beautiful, surreal, intensely personal self-portrait. And the art world is in a frenzy.
The headlines are all about the numbers. It’s expected to fetch between forty and sixty million dollars. It could become the most expensive work by a female artist ever sold at auction, breaking the record set by Georgia O’Keeffe. And you read this, and you’re supposed to be impressed. You’re supposed to think, ‘Wow. Progress.’
But what are we actually celebrating here?
Let’s just pause for a moment and look at the other side of the ledger. The record for a work by a male artist? Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. Four hundred and fifty million dollars.
So, the very best-case scenario for one of the most famous, most revered female artists in history is that her masterpiece might sell for about ten percent of a painting by a man. And this is being framed as a triumph.
It’s not a triumph. It’s a joke. A very, very expensive joke.
And this isn’t just about dead artists. The record for a living female artist, Marlene Dumas, is thirteen and a half million dollars. The record for a living male artist, Jeff Koons, is ninety-one million.
So what is going on here? Is the work of male artists just… better? Is it six, seven, ten times better? Of course not. That’s a stupid question. The art market has nothing to do with ‘better’. It’s a market. And like any market, it’s driven by a complex, and often deeply irrational, set of beliefs.
And the foundational belief of the art market, it seems, is that art made by women is simply worth less.
At first, you think, that’s too simple. Too reductive. There must be other factors. But then you look at the research. And it’s just… bleak.
There was a study. They showed a group of gallery-goers a series of AI-generated artworks. Half the group were told the works were by a man. The other half were told they were by a woman. The works signed by a man were rated higher. It’s that simple. It’s that crude. The bias is so deep, so ingrained, that it literally changes what people see.
Then there’s the even more startling discovery by the art historian Helen Gørrill. She looked at thousands of auction results. Art signed by a man went up in value compared to unsigned work. Art signed by a woman… it went down. Her signature, her very identity as a woman, made the work less valuable.
The whole thing feels a bit like a rigged casino. The house always wins. And in the art world, the house is a man. It’s the male-dominated auction houses, the male-dominated museums, the male-dominated world of collectors. They are the ones who set the value.
And what are the reasons they give for this disparity? They are so absurd, so insulting, you almost have to laugh.
Gørrill spoke to big dealers who said their collectors ‘lose trust’ in women artists once they have a child. They’re no longer able to focus fully on their artwork, apparently. The value of a woman’s art ‘dips because of biology’. Can you even imagine someone saying that out loud in any other industry? That a woman’s professional value decreases because she has a family? Tracey Emin, in a moment of brutal honesty, once said: “There are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men.”
And then there’s the ageism. The dealer who told an artist to get Botox because she ‘looked haggard’. “Men are allowed to be old and ugly,” she said.
So what does that tell you? It tells you that a female artist is not just being judged on her work. She is being judged on her biology, on her family choices, on her appearance. She is being judged as a woman first, and as an artist second. And that judgement is a discount. A massive, financially ruinous discount.
The museums, of course, have a huge role to play in this. They are the gatekeepers of the canon. The ones who decide what is important, what is worthy of being preserved and shown. And for centuries, they have overwhelmingly chosen to preserve and show the work of men. By not collecting as many female artists, a museum sends a clear signal to the market: this work is less valuable.
I remember talking to a young curator a few years ago, and she was so full of hope. She said things were changing. That her generation was going to rebalance the scales. And yes, there has been a lot of talk. A lot of ‘discourse’. Museums are taking ‘affirmative action’. But on the ground, in the auction rooms where the real money changes hands, the numbers tell a different story.
The collector Valeria Napoleone, who has spent decades building a collection exclusively of women’s art, puts it perfectly. You don’t want a female artist to be “a decorative object on a man’s suit.” You want her to be “part of the fibre of the suit.” And that, she says, is going to take generations.
So when this Frida Kahlo painting sells, and the headlines scream about the new record for a female artist, we should be clear about what we are seeing. It’s not a victory. It’s a data point. A very clear, very public, data point that shows just how vast, how structural, and how deeply, infuriatingly sexist, the art world still is.
It’s a beautiful painting. A masterpiece. And it will sell for a fraction of what it would be worth if Frida had been a man. That’s the real story. And it’s not a pretty one.
