Art & Creativity Quote by Cindy Sherman

Sherman’s complaint isn’t just about pay gaps; it’s about how art history quietly assigns status. Photography, in the market’s old pecking order, still gets treated like the “reproducible” medium, the one that can be editioned and circulated and therefore must be cheaper, less singular, less mythic than paint on canvas. Add “woman artist” to that equation and she’s describing a double markdown: medium bias plus gender bias, both dressed up as neutral taste.

What makes the quote land is its unsentimental candor. Sherman doesn’t offer the crowd-pleasing posture of being above it all; she admits she’s competitive, still measuring herself against “male painters and male artists,” the category that museums and collectors have historically framed as the default setting for genius. That confession is the subtextual gut-punch: even an artist who helped define postmodern image-making is forced to negotiate a scoreboard designed without her in mind.

The context matters because Sherman’s work has always exposed how value gets manufactured - how the camera can both reveal and stage identity. Here, she turns that lens on the art economy itself. Her frustration isn’t abstract feminism; it’s a report from inside the institution. The “still definitely” and “still really” do the heavy lifting, signaling fatigue with progress narratives that claim the bias is over. She’s naming a hierarchy that survives by pretending it’s merely preference, not power.