For the last 4 years, the Tasmanian Museum of Old and New Art has been running an installation called The Ladies Lounge. Only people who identify as ladies are allowed to enter. In the lounge, they can sit in luxury and look at famous artworks by Picasso etc, which are not available elsewhere in the museum. They are served champagne and pampered by male butlers. It was meant as a comment on exclusionary men's clubs (which still exist in Australia and elsewhere).
Some dude got upset about it and sued the gallery for entry at the anti-discrimination tribunal. The artist, Kirsha Kaechele, said she was "absolutely delighted" that the exhibit had been taken to court. “The men are experiencing Ladies Lounge, their experience of rejection is the artwork,” she said.
She then turned the tribunal hearing into part of the art as well, by having a group of women observing the hearing dress like her and mimic her every move. They did not disrupt the hearing, and at the end of proceedings they exited the tribunal to the song Simply Irresistible.
Kaechele argued in her defence the Ladies Lounge was a “a response to the lived experience of women forbidden from entering certain spaces throughout history” and promoted equal opportunity.
The tribunal found against the gallery and is ordering them to allow men to enter the exhibit. MONA is removing the exhibit instead.
@fullfathomfive I'd love to know how many people who don't normally identify as women claimed to do so in order to view this exhibit. bc transphobes are screaming that this happens constantly, and this seems like the lowest-stakes "ID as a woman to access women's spaces" scenario out there
like, it's ridiculous to think that a serious man athlete would take hormones to permanently alter his body and then spend months/years being referred to as the wrong name and pronouns simply to compete in women's sports but that a random Australian man wouldn't walk up to an exhibit and say "I identify as a lady" to look at some art and then never see any of the ladies/butlers who had been there again
@fullfathomfive Love the double-take mental image of the Robert Palmer 'Simply Irresistible' video that had a male lead singer with a vapid-looking backup band, except that Palmer was the pretty face and the female band had the serious musical chops.
@fullfathomfive this is extremely funny, I love it. It's also a potentially very interesting case study in what art is. Like really unpacking the claim that "their experience of rejection is the artwork" is probably worth a philosophy thesis.
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