ABSTRACT
Art history and criticism are frequently divorced: people can practice one or the other. Basically, the myth is that art historians aim for objectivity by gathering data that will prove the "truth" about various aspects of an artist's life and career or of a particular period's aesthetic mentality. Far more sophisticated than feminist theory and scholarship is feminist literary criticism. Consequently its development in the 1970s and methodology serve as useful models for an understanding of feminist art criticism. Feminist criticism of this order belongs to an art criticism of overtly personal engagement, which has waxed and waned in appeal during the past two centuries. Feminist art criticism is significant and necessary because it challenges what feminist literary critic Annette Kolodny calls the "dog-eared myth of intellectual neutrality." Art criticism, like other disciplines that privilege the intellect, is generally deprived of the spontaneous knowing of intuition—of knowledge derived from the senses and experience as well as the mind.
