Feb 08

Tingle Alley: Nicht Kunts

I’m glad Vida and their pie charts have temporarily made counting vaginas acceptable again. As a long-time vagina-counter, I’ve never done charts but I do have my own term for publications/ institutions that rarely include women. A few years ago I was at a modern art museum in Germany — the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, an immense hangar-like museum, very shiny, very new — and was enjoying myself until around the fourteenth gallery or so when I realized that I hadn’t yet seen a single piece of work by a woman artist. Not one. I started walking quicker and quicker through the hallways until I was pretty much trotting up to name cards to see if I could find just one piece of work by a female artist — and there wasn’t one in the entire museum (unless somewhere in Berlin there’s a woman named Dirk doing interesting things with turntables, which more power to her). It’s hard to describe how dispiriting it was, to be in a shiny new place where art was being reimagined in all kinds of radical ways, across thousands and thousands of square feet, which still couldn’t find room to include any women.

I started calling it the Nicht Kunts Museum. And “Nicht Kunts” is now what I say to myself whenever there’s a new prize list that includes hardly any work by women or the literary discussion of Who Is the Greatest Ever turns depressingly all-male or I open the New Yorker and the ratio of male to female writers remains roughly what it was when Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker were writing for it. Vagina counting often feels lonely and furtive (“again, with the lack of women! haven’t we talked about this enough already!?”, etc.), so it can be nice to have something to call it besides “vagina counting.” Nicht Kunts.

At one time, Carrie and I (and a couple friends who shall remain nameless unless they would like to be named) actually took out the domain nichtkuntsmuseum.com, thinking we would keep track of and comment on all qualifying publications and institutions, but then we realized we didn’t have that kind of time and let it lapse.

Source: tinglealley