Mary Kelly
Moderna Museet | Stockholm
In the New York Times of October 17, 1980, Hilton Kramer maligned Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, 1974–79an installation of thirty-nine place settings for historically significant and mythical womenas “art so mired in the pieties of a political cause that it quite fails to acquire any independent artistic life of its own.” His parry against Chicago, and by extension the women’s movement, was as reckless as Clement Greenberg’s dismissal of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work as “pseudo-modern art . . . little more than tinted photography.” Such chauvinism would have been familiar to Mary Kelly,