Western Eurocentric Culture

Within Western Eurocentric culture, there exists a discourse concerning the preconceived ideas that narrate the conversations, readings, and information we consume in our academic and daily lives within a highly Eurocentric culture and society. Within the academic art world, there is an underlying plot that actively works to exclude those that do not assimilate to its narrative. This chronology has created much conversation in modern academia regarding the seemingly innocuous and once rarely questioned values the institute has relied on for millenia.

The underlying Eurocentric narrative present in the identity of culture and politics is the conversation of the assumed authority of texts, art history or music that play into the canonicity.

Historically, if women are to have a natural artistic talent, it is usually referred to as a god given gift, rather than natural artistic genius,unlike the female artist’s male counterpart; a justification of the denial of women for those within the canon. The considerable lack of representation of great women artists can be attributed to the women’s rejection of access to Western Art greatness. When the hierarchy of art was still an element to the artistic society, the ability to paint an in-depth human figure was crucial to paint the most prestigious forms of painting. Women were not allowed to even draw a clothed human body until 1893. Lack of access to proper training and of access to materials, further excluded women from learning the skills necessary to be included in the first place. The canon likes to pretend that there is no importance of labour in art and the claim that talent alone is enough to make success in the Western art world. The canon is a vigorous denial of the potential greatness of female authorship; actively leaving out impoverished, female, non-European perspective drains the academic and art world of perspectives that would benefit from the

Griselda Pollock suggests two solutions; the complete abolishment of the canon- or, the expansion of the Western canon to include what it fiercely rejects. In W. J. T. Mitchell’s essay, Picture theory: essays on verbal and visual representation (University of Chicago Press, 1994) Mitchell argues that pictures may actually be able to represent themselves and create their own form of metalanguage. Theoretically,Mitchell is discussing the option of disassociating the pictorial self-reference from the arguments of modern art aesthetics fighting against the canon. Pollock is heavily encouraging a verbal discussion about the pictures, the texts, museums, galleries, art history and films we consume to dismantle the harmful white male gaze that dictates the current narrative of the canon. For Pollock, the solution to our problem is as follows; continue the conversation within academic society,consequently continue to analyze the structure and point out its flaws and