(older fans talking about fan work and copywright in the late 80s to early 2000s)

Comics companies don’t frequently sue people who sell products based on their characters, probably because it’s not worth their time and/or money to go after a small artist selling mugs with Spider-Man’s face. So, to go forth with suing this company, means the shirt was a big enough threat to their own products (and, considering it was near USA’s father’s day, they probably did have similar things selling), which is backed by the fact that it was selling on Target. The fact that they didn’t sue Target, though, and that initially contected the manufacturer asking them to take down the shirt, shows that they weren’t really after gaining money, but simply not loosing theirs (or be impaired morally, as not going after such a clear copyright infrigement could make it look like anyone could use DC’s copyrights for their own gain).

Men: 143 (16 female nudes)

Women: 7 (1 female nude)

Unknown: 9 (1 female nude)

Obs.: the one female nude by an unknown artist is attributed to a man, so it's picture will be grouped with the ones made by men.

Statues: 27

Unknown artists: 20 (9 female nudes)

Men: 7 (2 female nudes)

Obs.: 17 of the statues by unknown artists (including the 9 female nudes) belong to a single collection of religious african symbols. I don’t known enough about the culture or the religion, so none of my opinions apply to them (and, therefore, I didn’t upload the pictures).

Installations: 3

Women: 2

Men: 1

Obs.: I'm counting the Guerrilla Girls poster as an installation here

Photography: 2

Women: 1

Men: 1

Collages: 2

Women: 1

Men: 1

Urns: 4

Unknown: 4

 I was already planning on taking notes about this, and what I saw definitely confirmed the poster. Out of the 159 paintings I counted, 143 of them were made by men (16 having women – or representations of women – in at least some state of nudity) and only 7 were made by women. There were 9 paintings by unknown or uncertain artists, one of them showing partial female nudity, and one thing that called my attention is that a lot of them were assumed to be made by men. The female nude was attributed to Agostino Brunias and two anonymous artists (Maestro di San Martino alla Palma and Maestro del Bigallo, as they’re called by italian art historians) are referred to as male. I understand that most known painters in history are men (in part because women were discouraged from learning to paint, or do anything that didn’t involve marriage, house and children, but I digress), but this kind of attitude is what made a number of Artemisia Gentileschi’s works be attributed to her father, Orazio, for decades, just because she signed them with her last name.

 Another thing I noticed is that, in all the paintings by female artists exhibited, the subject is women (including one sole nude). This doesn’t really necessarily reflects society, where most women have at least some form of internalised misogyny, and this often leads them to put down other women in the name of men, and value men as the subject of art a lot more (specially straight women), so it’s a piece of information I’m honestly not sure how to interpret.