The Artist’s Name: A rhizomatic (and gendering) divider?

The following chapter delves into the profound significance of the Artist’s Name category in the classification practices of art history. The key point is that this category plays a central and enduring role in the discipline’s discourses and practices, not least connected to art museums’ organisation of knowledge, but has not been studied as such an overdetermined divider or producer of differences. Implicitly, the chapter addresses how the Artist’s Name category propagates a binary gender difference. The pervasive influence of this category not only generates differences in various ways but also perpetuates this binary through the simple but traditional gendering of first names. The Artist’s Name category is not gendered, but due to the cultural use of prenames, the category reveals the gender imbalance in, for example, art museums. In what follows, however, the spread and significance of the Artist’s Name category is in focus, less one of its severe side effects, even if it appears along the way.