A museum in Australia is being forced to allow men into art exhibit originally conceived for women only, after a tribunal ruled it “discriminatory,” following a complaint by a disgruntled man who was denied entry.
Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has been ordered to stop refusing entry to “persons who do not identify as ladies,” to its Ladies Lounge exhibit within 28 days, after a ruling was made by the Tasmanian Civil and Administrative Tribunal on Tuesday.
The experiential artwork by artist and museum curator Kirsha Kaecheleis billed by the museum as a “tremendously lavish space” where women can indulge in “decadent nibbles, fancy tipples, and other ladylike pleasures — hosted and entertained by the fabulous butler.”
Jason Lau, a visitor from New South Wales, who had paid the museum’s $35 AUD ($23 USD) entry fee, was barred from entering the exhibit on April 1 last year. According to tribunal documents, Lau believed he experienced direct gender discrimination. “He felt strongly enough about this to file a complaint with Equal Opportunities Tasmania,” read the notes.
During proceedings, Kaechele told the tribunal that denying men entry to the mysterious room is indeed part of the art — giving them a taste of the discrimination and exclusion many women have experienced through history.
Kaechele said she believed that women “deserve both equal rights and special privileges in the form of unequal rights,” as a means of restitution for historical injustices, “for a minimum of 300 years.”
In its judgment, the tribunal recognized that the art exhibition had “a pointedly participatory component that is intentionally discriminatory, for a good faith artistic purpose that many might not only appreciate but sympathise with or endorse.”
However, it also asserted that Australia’s 1998 anti-discrimination act “does not permit discrimination for good faith artistic purpose per se.”
An extension of the art
Throughout the proceedings Kaechele and her supporters treated the tribunal as an extension of her art, wearing matching dark blue suits and synchronizing their movements.
In her witness statement to the tribunal, the artist said: “We are so deeply embedded in the dominion of man that we do not even see the myriad ways in which we adhere to and multiply his reign.”
She added this is why the Ladies Lounge was needed as “a peaceful space women can retreat to; a haven in which to think clearly, and relish the pure company of women — to escape the invisible story woven through history.”
Kaechele in an earlier interview with ABC’s The Project, told the program she was “grateful” for Lau’s complaint, as it gave her the chance to test out the argument legally, but warned that a ruling in Lau’s favor would mean the Ladies Lounge would have to close.
“Because the requirement is that it will have to open to men, and that’s not happening,” she said.
After Tuesday’s ruling, MONA’s official spokesperson told CNN that the institution was “deeply disappointed” by the tribunal’s decision. “We will take some time to absorb the result and consider our options,” they said, adding: “We request that the artist’s privacy is respected at this time.”
The museum’s official Instagram account posted a more explicit response: a photo of a velvet-clad hand, adorned with the initials KK, giving the middle finger, to which one user commented, “I visited in 2021 with my husband and loved the novelty of being able to go into a space that no man was allowed into. It was beautiful, the room, the art installation, the meaning of it all.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
