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"Behind these contradictory sentiments, there are several prevailing mythologies at play: that success is based purely on talent — not mentorship, investment, or visibility; that with enough good intentions, the gendered power imbalance of the status quo will magically dismantle itself; and that top female artists are on equal footing with their male peers."

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Contrary to how Art Basel Miami Beach may appear on Instagram, the debaucherous art fair does not take place inside a bubble. The tumult of our political climate makes its way into the booths, where the art discloses underlying anxieties over the administration, white supremacy, and now more than ever, the traumas of the female body.

Artists left the booths to combat sexual assault out into the open. Carrying a riot shield that read "PUSSY GRABS BACK" in pink capital letters, Michele Pred led a Parade Against Patriarchy through the streets of South Beach. On a terrace at the Edition hotel, Tara Subkoff, who had came forward with her own Harvey Weinstein harassment story this year, staged Synaptic Fatigue/Dear in the Headlights, a performance piece of 16 women, scored live with arias of paralysis and grief, reliving a singular memory of harassment or assault. For an hour, blinded by floodlights, they wept.

"There's a lot of grief to process," said actor Selma Blair, who performed in Subkoff's work and also recently went public with her own story of sexual harassment. "This reckoning is coming with a lot of pain, but also the joy and hope that women are finally being heard."

Other feminist issues manifested themselves in the conventional gallery spaces, like at the Bass Museum, where Mika Rottenberg's absurd, all-female films illustrated the ills of late capitalism. There and throughout the fairs, hair served as the recurring symbol of female identity, beauty, and status: Rottenberg's disembodied, bouncing ponytails, the cascading tresses of a wall-mounted Tanya Aguiñiga sculpture at Design Miami, or the blonde wig Kalup Linzy donned daily at the David Castillo booth at Art Basel, assuming his alter-ego Katonya and adding dimensions of queerness and color to our discourse on femininity.

Other favorite works include FlucT's dystopic choreography against rape culture, commissioned by Artsy Projects; Aneta Grzeszykowska's photographs at Nada that recast beauty masks as torture devices; and a solo show at Nina Johnson Gallery by Katie Stout, an artist who, through the guise of being a furniture designer, reappropriates the domestic space. Her Lady Lamps brought to mind the caryatids that bear the weight of Greek antiquity, except for their deflection of the male gaze through their cartoonishly misshapen bodies, including the electrical cords emerging from their genitals.

Gallerists throughout the fairs have taken note that museums, pushed by shifts in popular culture and the political sphere, are now urgently filling the gaps of art history in terms of both racial and sexual representation. Consequently at Art Basel, a seminal generation of radical female artists including Judith Bernstein, Carolee Schneemann, Letícia Parente and Zilia Sánchez were finally enjoying their place in the spotlight, now 40-odd years into their respective careers. Between their work and Suzy Kellems Dominik's I Can Feel, a pink neon vagina orgasming in a 12ft halo of blinking fireworks (installed in the Nautilus Hotel lobby with a built-in platform for selfie-taking, no less), it seemed that feminism had finally gone completely mainstream.

"When Monika Sprüth opened her gallery in 1983, one of her main objectives was to give female artists equal representation to male artists, which back in those days was very unusual," said Sprüth Magers senior director Andreas Gegner. At the gallery's booth at the main fair, there were works by prominent feminists Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, whose 1970s truism, Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise, has just become the rallying cry against sexual abuse in the art world.

Today, however, only about 30% of the artists Sprüth Magers represents are female, making "those days" that Gegner mentioned not as distant as one would hope. Their ratio is on par with the industry average, according to Micol Hebron's Gallery Tally, a data visualization project on the economics of inequality in the art world. (During Art Basel Miami Beach, it was shown at the new and very excellent feminist satellite exhibition, Fair.)

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Suzy Kellems Dominik's I Can Feel. Photograph: Madison McGaw/BFA

When confronted with these numbers, gallerists who take credit for championing female artists begin to backpedal. "There's been a huge emphasis on female artists in the last two years, but it's a hype," said Gegner. "[Sprüth] represented female artists next to the male artists; it was not about gender, it was about talent. Any kind of movement tends to go over edge and then fade, so it shouldn't be a movement. It should be a natural thing."

Similarly at the fair Untitled, Eric Firestone posited his gallery as a platform to champion underdog artists marginalized from the cannon. His booth featured a 1960 painting by Miriam Schapiro, whom he praised for founding a feminist art program at CalArts when the art world "was" male-dominated. He does, however, believe there's an excessive emphasis on the statistics of representation.

"Ultimately, if the work doesn't hold up, I don't care who you are - black, white, female, male, Latin - I just want to show the best possible work," he said. "I believe that speaks to being a feminist: equality. It just happens that I have a pretty even balance." (According to Firestone's website, men on his roster actually outnumber women two to one.)

Behind these contradictory sentiments, there are several prevailing mythologies at play: that success is based purely on talent - not mentorship, investment, or visibility; that with enough good intentions, the gendered power imbalance of the status quo will magically dismantle itself; and that top female artists are on equal footing with their male peers. In reality, however, equality is like oxygen; the higher you go, the less there is. After the first three days of sales at Art Basel, the Everest of the art world, the most expensive reported work was a Bruce Nauman installation that went for $9.5m. The most expensive work by a female artist was a $1m piece by Yayoi Kusama, the only woman reported to break the million-dollar mark.

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Katie Stout at the Nina Johnson Gallery. Photograph: Art Basel Miami

"Every year, the top sellers at the fair are men, and if you do see a woman on the list, it's at one-tenth of the price," said Hebron. As for gallery representation, "when galleries do all-women shows but don't actually represent more women, they benefit from the cache without changing their operational model," she added. "When it comes down to supporting careers and investing financially in women, they're not doing the work."

Gallerists will say that their rosters respond to the whims of the market, collectors, and institutional backing; curators will say their shows respond to gallerists; and collectors will say they're buying what's being shown to them. Amid the blame-shifting, neon vaginas, and premature self-congratulations, real change is going to require dedicated course correction, investment in female artists, and a commitment to the long game. And so the question remains: who's going to do the work?

"I'm putting in the investment," said Seattle gallerist Mariane Ibrahim. "I'm putting in the energy and the risk." At Untitled, across the aisle from Eric Firestone's booth, she presented collaged paintings by gender-fluid artist Clotilde Jimenez and portraits by Johannesburg-based painter Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi. At the last two Armory Shows, she said, she's only shown the work of female African artists, perhaps one of the least represented groups in the art world.

"The first year, I sold out, and the second year, I won a prize," Ibrahim said. "I've taken the risk, but I've been rewarded, because yes, there is a demand. There's a gap between the demand and what's on offer. I've seen so much of that attitude everywhere: 'No, we don't have the market.' Then create the market. We need to be at the table starting the conversation."

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'There's a lot of grief to process': how the #MeToo movement gripped Art Basel Miami Beach

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Contrary to how Art Basel Miami Beach may appear on Instagram, the debaucherous art fair does not take place inside a bubble. The tumult of our political climate makes its way into the booths, where the art discloses underlying anxieties over the administration, white supremacy, and now more than ever, the traumas of the female body.

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Editor's Note: Woody Allen, who declined to comment prior to publication, has long denied the allegations described in this Op-Ed. Dylan Farrow's allegations against Allen were investigated by sex-abuse experts at Yale-New Haven Hospital, who found no evidence of abuse. Some questioned their methodology. A state's attorney in Connecticut said he had "probable cause" to prosecute in 1993 but did not file charges.
We are in the midst of a revolution. From allegations against studio heads and journalists, to hotel maids recounting abuses on the job, women are exposing the truth and men are losing their jobs. But the revolution has been selective.

I have long maintained that when I was 7 years old, Woody Allen led me into an attic, away from the babysitters who had been instructed never to leave me alone with him. He then sexually assaulted me. I told the truth to the authorities then, and I have been telling it, unaltered, for more than 20 years. Why is it that Harvey Weinstein and other accused celebrities have been cast out by Hollywood, while Allen recently secured a multimillion-dollar distribution deal with Amazon, greenlit by former Amazon Studios executive Roy Price before he was suspended over sexual misconduct allegations? Allen's latest feature, "Wonder Wheel," was released theatrically on Dec. 1.

Allen denies my allegations. But this is not a "he said, child said" situation. Allen's pattern of inappropriate behavior - putting his thumb in my mouth, climbing into bed with me in his underwear, constant grooming and touching - was witnessed by friends and family members. At the time of the alleged assault, he was in therapy for his conduct towards me. Three eyewitnesses substantiated my account, including a babysitter who saw Allen with his head buried in my lap after he had taken off my underwear. Allen refused to take a polygraph administered by the Connecticut state police.

The system worked for Harvey Weinstein for decades. It works for Woody Allen still.

In the final legal disposition of the matter, a judge denied him custody of me, writing that "measures must be taken to protect" me and that there was "no credible evidence" that my mother, Mia Farrow, coached me in any way. A prosecutor took the unusual step of announcing that he had probable cause to charge Allen but declined in order to spare me, a "child victim," from an exhausting trial.

It is a testament to Allen's public relations team and his lawyers that few know these simple facts. It also speaks to the forces that have historically protected men like Allen: the money and power deployed to make the simple complicated, to massage the story.

In this deliberately created fog, A-list actors agree to appear in Allen's films and journalists tend to avoid the subject.

Discussing Weinstein, "Wonder Wheel" star Kate Winslet said, "The fact that these women are starting to speak out about the gross misconduct of one of our most important and well-regarded film producers, is incredibly brave and has been deeply shocking to hear." Of Allen, she said "I didn't know Woody and I don't know anything about that family. As the actor in the film, you just have to step away and say, I don't know anything, really, and whether any of it is true or false. Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person. Woody Allen is an incredible director."

Likewise, Blake Lively said of Weinstein: "It's important that women are furious right now. It's important that there is an uprising. It's important that we don't stand for this and that we don't focus on one or two or three or four stories, it's important that we focus on humanity in general and say, 'This is unacceptable.' " But on the subject of Allen, she said, "It's very dangerous to factor in things you don't know anything about. I could [only] know my experience."

Greta Gerwig, who starred in Allen's "To Rome With Love" and has called him her "idol," said of the revelations about Weinstein and other powerful men, "It's heartbreaking and I think it's overdue." But when pressed by Terry Gross of NPR on whether she felt conflicted about working with Allen, Gerwig grew uncomfortable. "You know, it's all very difficult to talk about...." she said. "I think I'm living in that space of fear of being worried about how I talk about it and what I say."

For decades, Allen has used the same defense-through-intimidation techniques that Weinstein allegedly did. In 1997, Connecticut Magazine reported that Allen's legal team had hired private investigators, including ones assigned to find damaging information on law enforcement officials working the sex-abuse case. As my brother Ronan Farrow documented in the Hollywood Reporter last year, Allen's public relations team, led by Leslee Dart of the firm 42 West, jumps into action whenever allegations resurface. In retaliation for Ronan's story, Dart barred the publication from a lunch event related to Allen's feature at the Cannes Film Festival.

Even now, I hesitate to speak out. Allen's savvy affiliates know that it's unseemly to direct attacks at me, an alleged victim, and so the invective is directed at my mother again and again. It's awful and enraging.

Especially painful is that Allen even managed to enlist my brother Moses against me. Moses now claims that my mother "brainwashed" him and "coached" me to accuse Allen, contradicting many years of testimony. Moses' comments are devastating, but like so many of the attacks on my story, irrelevant: Moses was not there for the alleged assault.

Many publications refuse to run broadsides against me and my family, while others happily repeat the distortions. They repeat that my allegations were made during a custody dispute, which is not true. In fact, Allen sued for custody of me and Ronan only after the investigation into child abuse began. Charming. Many point to a questionable 1993 report that concluded no abuse had taken place. The author of that report never interviewed me, and the team later destroyed all of its notes without explanation.

Although the culture seems to be shifting rapidly, my allegation is apparently still just too complicated, too difficult, too "dangerous," to use Lively's term, to confront.
Dylan Farrow is a writer and advocate for survivors of sexual abuse. Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or Facebook MORE FROM OPINION What happens when society ignores sexual assault? You get Lesotho, where girls aren't even safe at the grocery store Survivors of sexual violence don't owe anyone our stories. Here's why I'm telling mine. #MeToo What's life like for thousands of incarcerated women? Imagine if Hollywood's worst predators had a key to your home
The truth is hard to deny but easy to ignore. It breaks my heart when women and men I admire work with Allen, then refuse to answer questions about it. It meant the world to me when Ellen Page said she regretted working with Allen, and when actresses Jessica Chastain and Susan Sarandon told the world why they never would.

It isn't just power that allows men accused of sexual abuse to keep their careers and their secrets. It is also our collective choice to see simple situations as complicated and obvious conclusions as a matter of "who can say"? The system worked for Harvey Weinstein for decades. It works for Woody Allen still.

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Dylan Farrow: Why has the #MeToo revolution spared Woody Allen?

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Editor's Note: Woody Allen, who declined to comment prior to publication, has long denied the allegations described in this Op-Ed. Dylan Farrow's allegations against Allen were investigated by sex-abuse experts at Yale-New Haven Hospital, who found no evidence of abuse. Some questioned their methodology.

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On Tuesday, Democratic representative of Michigan John Conyers announced that he would be retiring after facing several allegations of sexual harassment. The discussion about his misconduct began in late November, when it was revealed that he paid a $27,000 settlement to a woman who says she was fired for rejecting him. Since then, more women have come forward with stories about Conyers - including one former intern who says that, after she refused his advances, the congressman brought up missing federal intern Chandra Levy.

Courtney Morse, 36, spoke to the Washington Post about her internship with Conyers. She was 20 years old at the time of the alleged incident:

Morse told The Post she quit her internship after Conyers drove her home from work one night, wrapped his hand around hers as it rested in her lap, and told her he was interested in a sexual relationship. When she rejected his advances, Morse said he brought up the then-developing investigation into the disappearance of former federal intern Chandra Levy.

"He said he had insider information on the case. I don't know if he meant it to be threatening, but I took it that way," Morse said in an interview. "I got out of the car and ran."

Levy was an intern at the Federal Bureau of Prisons when she went missing in 2001. Her disappearance was an incredibly high-profile case, especially following reports that she was having an affair with married California congressman Gary Condit. Condit was cleared of any involvement and Levy's body was found the following year; to this day, her murder is still unsolved.

As for Conyers's resignation, Morse said it "feels like an easy way out." "He doesn't have to face an investigation now," she continued. "If he is vehemently denying he did anything, then it's not about reconciling the issue. It's about protecting his legacy."

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Conyers Brought Up Chandra Levy After an Intern Rejected His Sexual Advances

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On Tuesday, Democratic representative of Michigan John Conyers announced that he would be retiring after facing several allegations of sexual harassment. The discussion about his misconduct began in late November, when it was revealed that he paid a $27,000 settlement to a woman who says she was fired for rejecting him.

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We talk about separating art from artist, but many of the accused abusers aren't creators-they're gatekeepers

W hat do we do with the art of monstrous men?" asked Claire Dederer in The Paris Review last month. When genius creators like Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski are also known to be criminals and abusers, does it become somehow immoral to appreciate their work? Or, by contrast, is it unacceptable not to appreciate it, to let emotions like revulsion stand in the way of a purely intellectual appreciation of skill? When Dederer finds herself unable to sit through Woody Allen's Manhattan without nausea, is she doing right by the victims, or wrong by the auteur?

It's an interesting thought experiment, one we keep coming back to again and again - though rarely with more urgency than in the last few years, and then especially the last few months, as more and more abusers are unmasked. Is it possible to separate the art from the artist? Is it ethical? These are the sorts of philosophical questions that launch thousands of words of text. (Here's Pacific Standard in 2014. Here's The Guardian in 2013. Here's Newsweek in 2009.)

But meanwhile, as we wrestle with the questions of what to do with morally hideous artists, we ignore the more hideous truth: Most of the men whose abuses are now coming to light aren't makers of art. They're gatekeepers.

Two and a half weeks after Dederer's essay was published in The Paris Review, that publication's editor, Lorin Stein - the person tasked with setting the magazine's artistic vision and selecting the writing that does and does not appear -  resigned due to accusations of sexual misconduct. He's only the latest literary gatekeeper to fall. Hamilton Fish, president and publisher of The New Republic, resigned under similar circumstances in November. Leon Wieseltier, former literary editor of The New Republic, had a new magazine scuppered by harassment claims.

In the entertainment world, too, the abuses are being perpetrated not only by people whose art we can hand-wring over - the writers, the actors, the directors - but by the people behind the scenes, the ones deciding whose voices get heard. Harvey Weinstein, in many ways the hard-falling rock that set off this avalanche, was not a creator but a producer. "The accused are men who help to determine what art gets seen and appreciated - and, crucially, paid for," wrote Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine. When abusers don't just make art, but decide what art is, the calculation becomes trickier. It's not Woody Allen's movies that are tainted; it's the entire movie endeavor. And as literary gatekeepers hit the ground, they spread a similar stain.

You can't point to a work of genius by Stein and debate over whether it can still be appreciated. He wasn't a maker, but a tastemaker - part of a network of white, male, and yes, sometimes abusive literary tastemakers who have long defined what it takes for writing to be successful, what it means for writing to be "good." Witness, if you have the stomach for it, this nauseating-in-retrospect New York Times profile of Stein from when he took over the magazine. Stein offers to "pimp" Zadie Smith, and declares himself "kissed out" after a party, but the article also muses on his literary connections - all men - and his responsibility to the ideals of literary quality. "[ The Paris Review] will stand or fall on the quality of its literariness," says one of Stein's colleagues in the article's closing quote. "It has to provide beautiful, witty, rarefied fun of a distinct kind. ... Lorin needs to make The Paris Review matter to people for whom literature matters." It's Leon Wieseltier.

This closed-system idea of literary value, defined and defended by the kind of men who have always taken their power for granted and used it for gain, reverberates well beyond any single piece, or even any single publication. Nor will it be solved simply by removing the gatekeepers from their positions of influence. The Paris Review did once have a woman editor, Brigid Hughes, though she was ousted in favor of the more famous and flashy Philip Gourevitch in 2005. (And subsequently erased from the publication's history; I wouldn't have known about her without a tweet thread from A.N. Devers.) In a Times profile of Hughes, written when she took over the magazine in 2004, she insisted over and over that her only goal was "to publish good writing, whatever form that takes." When the reporter asked if she would try to shift the publication's notoriously skewed gender balance, she demurred that "I'm not going to consciously insist on half men and half women," although she allowed that she has "different tastes" than founder George Plimpton. It matters to have a person with different "tastes" - or rather, with different life experience, prone to noticing and appreciating different things - at the helm. But when "taste" and "good writing" are defined in large part by that network of powerful literary men, the ones clapping each other on the back about making literature matter and then being exposed as abusers one by one, it may not matter enough.

Once you realize how much the structures of literary power are bound up with the concept of literary quality, it becomes clear - if it wasn't already - that our entire concept of "quality" is suspect. The Paris Review publishes twice as many men as women; are men twice as good? The New York Times described Stein as "regarded by many as a champion of new talent, including some women writers," but that "some" is poison. One can't really make the case that Stein was a champion of women writers generally; under his auspices, The Paris Review went from one-third women writers to... one-third women writers. So who broke through to be part of the illustrious third? This is not to say that the writers who did make their way into The Paris Review's pages aren't worthy, but we should illuminate the hand that picked them, and the other work it cast aside. In short, if you weren't already paying attention to the ways that whiteness and maleness determine what we value in art, you should be now.

There is such a thing as "good writing"; it's not a purely vacuous phrase. (Most of the work in The Paris Review is, in fact, good writing, in various ways!) But any first-year writing workshop would push you to unpack the word "good." Do you mean rhetorically effective writing? Emotionally effective? Simple and clear writing? Evocative writing full of detail? Too often, what we actually mean by "good writing" is "writing that has been ratified by the literary establishment." But the literary establishment, we are coming to find, is bad. (Morally.) If your idea of value springs from an ethical void, it's time to transplant it onto stronger soil.

We can ask ourselves now, again, whether we can separate the art from the artist, and ask ourselves again when the next allegations come to light. But perhaps it's more important to ask whether we can separate art from the people who decide what art is -  and, crucially, what we've been missing that they wouldn't let us see.

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When Bad Men Define Good Art - Electric Literature

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We talk about separating art from artist, but many of the accused abusers aren't creators-they're gatekeepers W hat do we do with the art of monstrous men?" asked Claire Dederer in The Paris Review last month. When genius creators like Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski are also known to be criminals and abusers, does it become somehow immoral to appreciate their work?

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Fermynwoods Contemporary Art " Jessica Harby - Referendum