1Art worlds have been described as unstable professional environments that are structured by uncertainty (Friedson 1986; Menger 1989). In the absence of clear rights of entry for accessing them (Mauger 2008), it is reputation that determines an artist’s career advancement (Danner & Galodé 2008). Individuals must develop skills for managing the uncertainty of their success, in order to remain in their careers and enhance their reputations—skills that do not directly correspond to the possibility of turning artistic activity into paid work (Menger 1989, 2002). Two possible strategies include diversifying revenue sources and accumulating indicators that signal the quality of one’s artistic work—for example, prizes and public grants. Thus, an artistic career may be compared to a “march” through institutions of legitimation (de Nooy 2002): specialized schools; scholarships and other forms of assistance for creative endeavors; prizes; and sites where works of art are exhibited and sold at the regional, national, or supranational level. Indeed, the “globalized” contemporary art world has its own particular sites of legitimation (Sapiro 2013), with which those who aspire to international recognition must associate themselves (Moulin 1992: 354). For artists and artist intermediaries who come from regions considered peripheral or semi-peripheral to this space, which is marked by territorial inequalities (van Hest 2012; Quemin 2002), migration towards an international art centre can be part of a strategy for managing uncertainty (Guirao Soro 2019).

2In addition to geographical inequalities, inequalities of success—which are not only tolerated, but celebrated (Menger 2014)—also run through art worlds, as do social inequalities. Many recent works have focused on analysing the mechanisms by which certain populations are excluded from the artistic professions. In the United Kingdom, such research has looked in particular at inequalities of class (Friedman, O’Brien & Laurison 2016; O’Brien 2020), race (Nwonka 2020), and how these intersect with gender (Brook, O’Brien & Taylor 2020) within various art worlds. Other authors working elsewhere have highlighted ethnic inequalities in the milieu of music (Kolbe 2021); this dimension also appears to intersect with that of gender in research on the international mobility of musicians (Kowalczyk 2021). Gender inequalities within music (Picaud 2020), literature (Naudier 2010b), and the visual arts (Provansal 2023) have received a great deal of attention. Issues of gender are particularly salient within the art worlds, especially in the visual arts, where women greatly outnumber men in specialized trainings and within certain lines of work (particularly art mediation), but are significantly under-represented in the most prestigious positions in both commercial or institutional distribution channels.

3In this article, I examine the specific ways women build careers within the globalized contemporary art world by studying contemporary Spanish artists and art intermediaries who have emigrated to European art centres. The twofold uncertainty linked to combining an artistic career with international migration serves as an indicator of a set of recurrent behaviours that can be understood in connection with individual social characteristics. In particular, my research has shown that women are more likely than their male counterparts to turn to institutional mechanisms that provide funding and facilitate international mobility—but that this does not have a significant impact on either their level of visibility or their professionalization. The turn towards institutions seems to be an aid to career entry rather than an effective long-term strategy for professional development.

4This article is organized into three parts. The first focuses on gender inequalities in access to artistic careers and on migration as a compensatory strategy for these inequalities. The second part presents the “academic” professional ethos common among women in the study population and looks in particular at its origins in schooling. Finally, the third part shows how this professional ethos is mobilized in individuals’ professional development and their social integration into their destination countries, and how it functions as both a resource and an obstacle to the artistic recognition of women.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

Data and methodology

This article presents the results of a study of migrations within the European Union by Spanish contemporary artists and artist intermediaries since 1986. This study draws on qualitative methods of data collection and analysis, which are best suited to studying a population whose boundaries are fluid, both because of its mobility and the specificities of the professional milieu within which it evolves. The study population was defined based on a census of members of the Spanish contemporary art sector who emigrated after Spain’s entry into the EU, taking advantage of new opportunities for international circulation. This census, which I created, includes data from the Artfacts and Arteinformado databases, supplemented by data gathered from the websites of artists, art intermediaries, art galleries, and art institutions as well as data gathered using the so-called “snowball” method. Next, a multi-site field study (Marcus 1995) was carried out in the most popular destination cities for these individuals (Berlin, London, and Paris) as well as in Barcelona and Madrid between the years 2016 and 2020. Over the course of the study, during participant observation of events organized in local artists’ circles, I met 135 of the surveyed individuals and interviewed 104 of them.

The individuals interviewed were selected with the goal of capturing a variety of profiles within the surveyed population, both in terms of social traits (year of birth, year of emigration, sex, geographic origin, educational attainment) and in terms of their professions in the contemporary art world and their degree of professionalization. The interviewees were 65 artists and 39 artist intermediaries, of whom 56 were women and 48 were men, born between 1965 and 1993, who left Spain beginning in 1988, with a notable spike between 2008 and 2015, during the economic crisis. The objective of the semi-structured interviews I carried out was to obtain biographical information and data related to their professional contacts, the stages of their artistic careers and migration, their reasons for emigrating as well as the reasons that drew them to their particular destination cities. Analysis of these interviews brought to light gendered differences in how men and women understand and approach artistic careers and career internationalization through migration to a European artistic centre. In conjunction with this, prosopographic analysis of subjects’ CVs made it possible to quantify their use of institutional support for artistic practices and mobility, as well as their participation in training programs—rendering the differences between men and women even more visible.

In order to better understand the gendered differences in how men and women build artistic careers through migration, this article focuses on the trajectories of 56 women within the study population, including 27 contemporary artists and 29 contemporary art intermediaries who emigrated to Berlin (n = 22), London (n = 15), Paris (n = 11), Brussels (n = 4), and Amsterdam (n = 4). These women were for the most part of middle-class origin—more specifically, from families in which at least one parent had received higher education. The table below shows the distribution of the study population in terms of social class according to Miguel Requena’s (2011) adaptation of the European Socioeconomic Classification to Spanish social stratification.

1. Gender Inequalities in Accessing Artistic Professions and Career Internationalization

5There is evidence of women’s presence in art academies and private art schools from the earliest days of such institutions (McCall 1978; Trasforini 2007). Today, according to data from the European Institute for Gender Equality, women are in the majority in higher education arts and humanities programmes across Europe. This is also the case in Spain, where there are more women than men in art programs. Within higher education, the proportion of women is as high as 65% across graduates in the arts and human sciences, including fine arts, art history, and conservation and restoration studies.

6Within the study population, while all subjects had a diploma equivalent to three years of post-high-school study (Bachelor’s degree) in an art-related subject, women were more likely than men to have continued their studies with master’s and non-degree-granting programmes (29 of 42 had a degree equivalent to four years of post-high school or more).

2. Migration as Compensatory Strategy for Gender Inequality in the Arts

9International mobility is considered an essential part of the professional activity of artists and art intermediaries. It is supposed to facilitate access to visibility and recognition, in particular for professionals who come from the peripheries of the “globalized” contemporary art world (Rodríguez Morató 1996) and are more inclined to emigrate and establish residency in international “artistic centres” (Castelnuovo & Ginzburg 2009). In this respect, the international circulation of these professionals is similar to skilled migration. More specifically, the emigration of Spanish higher education graduates to the European Union has increased since 1986 (Alaminos Chica & Santacreu Fernández 2010), as has that of members of the cultural sector, and in particular of the visual arts.

10The study of skilled migration within the EU has shown that such population movements are often motivated by a lack of professional opportunities within migrants’ countries of origin (Favell 2008). Such career frustration may be due to the structure of the national job market, the prevalence of nepotism, or the existence of class- and gender-based “glass ceilings.” Thus, we may see migration as a mechanism of compensation for gender and class discriminations (Docquier et al. 2012) in the professional sphere that makes possible a kind of social and professional climbing that is unthinkable within the national space (Wagner 2010). The prototypical intra-European migrant is a young, middle-class female college graduate from Southern Europe and is more likely to be of provincial origin than traditional representations of the global cosmopolitan elite would suggest (Favell 2008: 85).

3. A Specifically Feminine Professional Ethos?

12I see the specific ways in which women build and internationalize their artistic careers through migration to European art centres as the result of an “academic” professional ethos common among the women in the study population. The concept of a professional ethos, developed by Pierre Bourdieu (2000: 99–100)—who was inspired by the work of Max Weber—refers to a “specific habitus, which is demanded of the new entrants as a condition of entry,” and which is “nothing other than a specific mode of thought (an eidos), the principle of a specific construction of reality, grounded in a pre-reflexive belief in the undisputed value of the instruments of construction and of the objects thus constructed (an ethos).” This concept makes it possible to explain the recurrence of certain individual behaviours within the specific symbolic context of globalized contemporary art and to connect artistic activity, integration into a destination, and the social characteristics of individuals.

13The sociology of artistic professions has examined processes that allow artists to access recognition while accounting for the specificity of creative work and of the artistic professions (Abbing 2002; Menger 2012). One such specificity has to do with the wide range in levels of professional integration that co-exist within the art world, resulting from the particular logics by which these worlds operate. In particular, the anti-economic behaviours of artists have been emphasized (Bourdieu 1983), putting into perspective the opposition between leisure and work within this milieu (Sinigaglia-Amadio & Sinigaglia 2017). Research in this area has sought to understand what women who aspire to be part of the art world do to improve their working conditions and their chances of achieving recognition. Bourdieu (1996) has described the field of cultural production as a space of power struggles, where varying levels of integration can be explained by the dominant or dominated positions held by agents and groups of agents. For Howard Becker (1982), art worlds are spaces of interaction within which positions are defined by the degree to which individuals are integrated into networks of artistic cooperation. Although entry into an artistic career often means passing through specific centres of higher education and participating in competitive selection processes (Menger 2015), later career development is linked to successive decisions made by individuals in various situations and defined by a variety of factors.

14More specifically, in connection with professional development in the domain of the visual arts, authors have found that artists may be oriented towards the market (Thom 2017), towards institutions (Bataille, Hedinger & Moeschler 2020), or towards grants (Karttunen 2019). An orientation towards grants seems to begin as early as art school and to persist over time, eventually becoming incorporated as an ethos (Abbing 2002; Karttunen 2019). Given the declared gender equity of institutions, it is not surprising that women would be more inclined to concentrate their efforts on institutional opportunities for professional development, in order to further their artistic careers and their career internationalization. Is it possible that an orientation towards grants, as part of a professional ethos that emerges out of an education in the arts and which is very common among female Spanish artists and artist intermediaries who emigrate, might actually have its origin in an earlier stage of life, arising as early as primary school and in parallel with familial socialization?

4. School as the Origin of the Academic Professional Ethos

15The “over-education” of women (Buisson-Fenet & Morin-Messabel 2017) has been widely researched within the domain of the sociology of education in the wake of various indicators revealing the differential success of girls in school (Cacouault-Bitaud & Oeuvrard 2009). Across Europe, girls are more successful in school than boys overall, repeating grades less frequently and accessing higher education at higher rates. Alongside familial socialization, which is thought to encourage girls to be more docile and serious (Baudelot & Establet 1992), school is thought to contribute to the construction of gendered differences and to have effects on women’s professional training, orientation, and integration (Duru-Bellat 2006). Girls are thought to be more attentive to the criteria for academic success and to better conform to the kinds of behaviours that are valorized in school contexts (Merle 1993)—behaviours might be reinvested to their advantage both within (Depoilly 2010) and outside of the school context. For girls, school may also be a site of possible emancipation—particularly for girls of working-class origin (Terrail 1992). Such traits are all part of the stereotype of the female student, as well as of the stereotype of the good working-class student, who does everything in their power to succeed (Bourdieu 1989; Gilly 1980; Subirats 2016). These are students who are serious and docile in doing the “job of student,” (Perrenoud 1994) without necessarily being the most talented.

16School socialization may thus be at the origin of the academic professional ethos, which can be defined by conformism and respect for rules, as well as by an acceptance of subordination and adaptation to merit-based processes of selection. The path of women who prolong their studies is characterized by an expectation that obtaining a degree will lead to professional opportunities, and by the constraint represented by a scarcity of opportunities to join largely male-dominated professions. According to Marie Duru-Bellat (2006), girls see their studies as a safety net, given their lesser chances for professional integration. Such a turn to education and to institutional certifications can also be seen in the strategies used by Spanish female artists and artist intermediaries who emigrate. Within the study population, more women than men (34 versus 16) pursued studies in their destination countries, very often with the help of study abroad scholarships. The academic dispositions displayed by women in the study population are particularly well suited to the practice of applying for scholarships, and allow them to benefit from these opportunities.

5. The Academic Professional Ethos as a Resource for an Artistic Career and Career Internationalization

17Institutional programmes that support the arts and intentional mobility function as tools for managing career uncertainty (Guirao Soro 2022). Not only do they provide economic resources for bringing to completion an artistic project and internationalizing one’s career, they also provide a framework for developing a professional network. In this way, they may facilitate career entry and the internationalization of an artistic career. Through specialized trainings and through the application processes for such programmes, including for scholarships and prizes, female artists and artist intermediaries may come into contact with their future colleagues, as well as build up visibility and resources that may help advance their careers (Karttunen 2019). These programmes usually involve a call for projects, with applications evaluated by a committee made up of professionals in the sector, who may or may not be associated with the institution in question. For this reason, even when a project does not receive a scholarship or funding, simply participating in such competitions provides a chance to be known by one’s peers and by contemporary artist intermediaries, as well as to expand one’s professional network (Haller 2019). The applications that candidates must submit usually include a portfolio, one or more texts describing the project, as well as a provisional budget and a timeline of the work required to complete the project. Beyond the technical skills needed to carry out the project, candidates must demonstrate a certain capacity for writing and administration (Patureau & Sinigaglia 2020).

18In my interviews, women often highlighted these technical and organizational skills in discussing their strategies for professional development, whereas the supplementary professions often practiced by men, which are more physical in nature (hanging exhibits, etc.), do not require any specific skills beyond those already acquired through their training as artists. Thus, as Lourdes, a plastic artist born in 1977 and based in Berlin since 2010, puts it:

• 9 All interview quotes were initially translated from the Spanish or Catalan into French by the auth (...)

In terms of professionalization, I’m very dedicated. I put together really good applications, my friends even ask me for help in doing their own.9

19María, a curator born in 1986 who also lives in Berlin and who holds a master’s degree as well as degrees from other specialized courses of study completed in various European cities described her work method thus:

I’m very organized, I love it. I make to-do lists with the artists, their works in the exhibit, everything. Tables, reverse-schedules…Writing up projects and organizing exhibits, once you’ve learned the tricks, it’s really easy.

20However, success in the project of professional development abroad implies the challenge of integrating into one’s new society and into the local art scene of one’s chosen city. In spite of the freedom to travel and work abroad allowed by the integration of the European Union, hierarchies remain between different immigration statuses, and glass ceilings exist on the basis of place of origin, mastery of the local language, and the possession of locally acquired qualifications (Erel & Ryan 2019; Smith & Favell 2006). As I have mentioned, within the study population, more women took advantage of programmes that allow for international mobility such as Erasmus or funded internships prior to permanently resettling abroad. Of the 54 individuals who received scholarships to go abroad, 34 were women. Women were more likely than their male counterparts to be “multi-recidivists” (Ballatore 2020) in programmes offering mobility: 19 women combined participation in Erasmus with a second scholarship later on, in contrast to just 3 men. Finally, women were in the majority among those interviewees who continued their education in their destination cities (36 of the 56 master’s received abroad). In many cases, long-term residency abroad was planned from the outset, and the decision to study abroad or take part in these programmes acted as both a justification and trigger for an emigration plan. As Silvia, who was born in 1979 and moved to London in 2008, puts it

The master’s was just an excuse to leave. So that people would understand I was really leaving, not just on a whim, but that there was a reason, because I had something to do there. It wasn’t a very good master’s program, but it helped me land, gave me a framework to do what I wanted to do.

21Olga, born in 1977 and now living in London, is another example. She had already completed master’s studies in Spain, but for her too registering for another course of study at a university represented a way to integrate into the local art scene:

I came to do the master’s. It seemed like it was a good starting place for establishing myself in the city. That is, it would have seemed crazy to me to go somewhere or move somewhere where I didn’t know anyone or knew just a few friends from Spain. It seemed like doing a master’s was already a way of entering into an interesting circle, of meeting people and having time to figure out how things would work beyond the master’s.

22Extending their educations and taking advantage of various professional development programmes are part of how these artists and art intermediaries arrive in their chosen destinations. However, we must also look at the constraints such opportunities impose. On the one hand, preparing applications takes specific skills and requires time—time that is not spent on other activities necessary for advancing one’s career in the art world (Sinigaglia-Amadio & Sinigaglia 2017). On the other hand, pursuing studies and other forms of training such as internships generally pre-supposes a level of mastery of the language used in the programme (or the local language). Whereas women in the study population willingly adapt to these pre-requisites, and in interviews even volunteer their linguistic competences without being asked, several men expressed distrust of trainings and institutional programmes that support the arts, which they see as restricting their creativity. In contrast, for the women, such programmes represent ways of maintaining an artistic career in the absence of other forms of recognition. Thus, Irene, who was born in 1980 and stayed in Berlin after spending a year there as an Erasmus student says:

For me, art is a career where you’re always learning. That’s why I extended my studies here. I started when I was 18 and when I was 22 I didn’t feel like I had finished. I saw it more as a way to keep getting input, to keep asking myself questions. I finished my bachelor’s [licence] in 2006 and I started the master’s in 2012, but in between I studied philosophy remotely. There has been maybe just one year since I was 18 where I haven’t enrolled at a university.

23Such overinvestment in academics and in external credentials of legitimacy finds a parallel in the process of integration in the destination country: of the few artists in the study population who took the nationality of their destination countries (3), all were women. While Brexit changed the administrative status of several interviewees living in London, making it necessary for them to apply for naturalization, other interviewees had different reasons for adopting the nationality of their destination sites. Raquel, for example, became a naturalized German citizen in 2013:

There were rumours that if Spanish people arrived in Germany and hadn’t found a job within six months, they lost the right to be here, or to receive government assistance, or something like that…I had a job and everything, but I figured if something were to happen to me, after so many years here, well, better to be on the safe side.

24Here again it is a matter of using a form of official certification to manage a situation of uncertainty—in this case, an administrative certification. Another example of this is Mar, a curator and director of cultural projects, who was born in 1985 in the South of Spain. Mar did an Erasmus year in Berlin and returned two years later for an internship funded by a European professional education programme. After working for several years in various independent cultural organizations, she began to feel the effects of the glass ceiling her migrant status represented:

Although it seems like everything is very open and multi-cultural, it’s actually a very closed circuit. You always need someone local who supports your project, otherwise you don’t have access to resources…that’s why I wanted to do a master’s, it was a little strategic, to put myself at that level, to enter into the local lexicon.

25She submitted two unsuccessful applications to local master’s programs; both times, the committee thought she was too far along in her career to benefit from the courses in question. She then had the idea of becoming a German citizen, in an attempt to access resources that were inaccessible to her as a foreigner:

It’s strategic in the sense that I am doing more and more international co-operation projects…but, unfortunately, very few Spanish programmes are associated with these networks. So, it was more strategic to become a German, because you enter into those circles. It’s more a question of…engineering in accessing resources [laughs].

26Mar describes her turn to locally recognized certifications as part of a strategy for developing professionally abroad, showing that the academic dispositions acquired beginning in school can be mobilized over the entirety of the lifespan, including outside of school, in order to confront situations of uncertainty, whether these are connected to a career in the arts or not.

6. The Risk of Being Trapped in Gender Stereotypes within the Art World

27For women, the behaviours associated with the academic professional ethos constitute a “trade-off” between their aspirations and their objective chances of success (Duru-Bellat 2006: 149). This professional ethos thus appears to be part of a strategy for combatting the gender segregation that has traditionally characterized the art world (Pasquier 1983; Trasforini 2007). Furthermore, a cosmopolitan investment (Wagner 2010) in the form of participation in merit-based mechanisms that promote mobility and integration into a destination country allows women to aspire to international careers within the world of contemporary art and to break free from the social determinisms of their countries of origin. However, especially for women who lack direct contact with the contemporary art world or who have less prestige, focusing on institutional dispositives carries the risk of keeping them at a distance from more legitimate spaces within the globalized art world.

28Sara is an example of someone who entered the German art scene by following the paths of both creative activity and art mediation. Her trajectory began with an Erasmus stay in the south of Germany, where she remained to pursue art studies equivalent to a master’s. She went on to do a paid professional internship in cultural mediation, and then a second funded internship in Leipzig. From there, she moved to Berlin, where she participated in a professional development programme for women artists, which was started in 1989 by a local organization. She moved between both types of artistic work—creation and mediation—in order to take advantage of all these programmes that allowed her to remain active in the contemporary art milieu. For a time, she and two others ran an independent exhibit space, a project for which she put her organizational skills to use. However, this project was not economically viable, so she supplemented it with part-time gallery and artist assistant work. In parallel, she continued to apply for scholarships and respond to calls for projects, both in Germany and in Spain, but without hope of one day being able to fully dedicate herself to making art. Like Sara, Irene stacked up projects and applications, both as an artist and as a curator. Her command of the language of her destination country allowed her to find subsistence work as a Spanish translator. Regarding her somewhat erratic artistic journey, she says:

I think in order to be successful in art, you have to be very coherent, have a very clear line, for the work to be unwavering, but for the discourse to be coherent. I wasn’t that way, and I think that’s because I applied to everything, I bended myself for everything and so…

29While skills in writing, organizing, and managing projects are useful for putting together applications to receive funding for artistic activities and internationalization, overly focusing on such programmes can be counter-productive. On the one hand, as Irene says, conforming to the standards and requirements of each call for projects makes it difficult to maintain coherence in one’s artistic production. On the other hand, institutional programmes that support art tend to valorise art that is difficult to market: conceptual works that are based on an artist’s personal research and that use formats such as installations and audio-visual works, which contrast with the more decorative, market-friendly kinds of art that usually find success on the market. Evolving at the margins of the commercial art market makes accessing recognition difficult, as Raymonde Moulin (1992) has shown, since recognition occurs at the intersection of institutions and the market.

30For women, the disinterest of the market and the lesser institutional recognition they receive, which is just now barely beginning to be rectified, stem in part from the fact that art made by women is systematically associated with negative representations (Parker & Pollock 1981). The artist’s gender acts as a stigmata that prevents both the aesthetic recognition of her work and its commercial success (Karner 1991; Lévy & Quemin 2011). By focusing on the kinds of artistic productions that are valorized by the institutional circuit, women risk trapping themselves in the gender stereotypes that circulate within all the various art worlds: for example, representations of women artists as being “too academic” in the domains of music (Buscatto 2008; Ravet 2013), literature (Naudier 2010a) and cultural administration (Dubois 2015). Starting at recruitment to art school, women face gendered representations and gender stereotypes that determine their ability to access artistic careers (Provansal 2016). Mathilde Provansal’s research shows in particular that as soon as they begin their artistic training, women tend to be considered “too academic” or “formatted”, and thus at odds with the ideology of talent and innate giftedness (ibid.). Thus, artistic recognition of women is hindered persistent gender stereotypes linked to schooling: the idea that their success is based solely on their hard work rather than on their talent.

31Women are gradually pushed toward less prestigious positions within the contemporary art world, often as “support personnel” (Becker 1982): mediators, assistants, managers. Women with profiles similar to Sara’s and Irene’s often turn to teaching, pursuing certification so they can work in the local public schools of their new countries of residence. When I interviewed Lidia, who was born in 1984 and now lives in Berlin, she was pursuing training to teach in German secondary schools. Although she had taken part in local art exhibits and events with some regularity since her arrival in the city, she still found it necessary to work part-time in retail. Her decision to turn to teaching was motivated not only by the promise of economic stability, but also by the opportunity to practice a profession in keeping with her level of education. As they reach the age of 35–40 (Marguin 2013), if their artistic careers have not gained enough momentum to be able to sustain them full-time (Sinigaglia-Amadio & Sinigaglia 2017), many women turn to jobs seen as more stable than creative work.

32This is in contrast to the experiences of men in the study population, many of whom combine creative work with occasional jobs hanging exhibits or doing art logistics, which involve tasks considered “masculine” (lifting heavy objects, handyman work), and from which women are very often excluded. These jobs leave them with plenty of time for making art, pay better than teaching or art mediation, and do not require certifications that require them to develop additional specific skills. In contrast, women must invest more time in their subsistence jobs, which may explain the fact that these jobs often end up becoming their main professions, since they compete for their time in a way that forces them to gradually abandon their creative activities (ibid.).

Conclusion

33Studying the career and immigration trajectories of female and male actors in the “globalized” contemporary art world reveals gendered differences in the use of strategies to manage career uncertainty. A series of actions that were more common among women in the study population—visible on their CV’s and confirmed by their interview statements—seem to be governed by an academic professional ethos. This ethos has its origin in socialization at school, and encompasses a set of dispositions that translate into specific practices for managing the uncertainty of an artistic career and its internationalization: extending one’s studies, accumulating professional certifications, and turning to institutional programmes that support creative activity, international mobility, and integration into a new art scene in a destination city.

34Continuing one’s studies and being a “multi-recidivist” in institutional programmes that support art creation and promote international mobility allowed women in the study population to access the contemporary art world and attempt an international career. The behaviours associated with the academic professional ethos allow these women to take advantage of international professional development opportunities and, in this way, to circumvent the sexism they have traditionally been victims of. However, repeated use of such strategies can, over the long term, be counter-productive. Specializing in works considered overly “institutional” or “academic” can distance artists from the art world and make it necessary for them to move repeatedly or to divide their time between art and a second career. The academic dispositions that women in the study population mobilize as part of their second careers and to support their integration projects within their destination countries keep them away from their artistic careers, not only because developing the specific skills that these activities require is time-consuming, but above all because such skills fly in the face of the artistic ideology of talent and individual innate giftedness. The academic professional ethos, which can serve as a stabilizer at the beginning of a career, ultimately ends up ruling out access to international recognition within the globalized art world.