I had been reading The Indian Mother Goddess, but now I am mostly focusing on 4 books, which relate to each other - Wet, by Mira Schor, The Conspiracy of Art by Jean Baudrillard, Differencing the Canon, and Vision & Difference by Griselda Pollock.

It is interesting to read a chapter from one, a chapter from the other, because they interrelate. Baudrillard is arguing that Art no longer exists, while to Pollock & Schor - it is not that Art does not exist - but that Art that seeks to prop up white, male, domination can not be taken seriously. Pollock writes:
"In ideology cultural practices are at once the means by which we make sense of the social process in which we are caught up indeed produced. ...First the practice must be located as part of the the social struggle between classes, races and genders... Second we must analyse what any specific practice is doing, what meaning is being produced, and how and for whom."

Pollock takes on art history in general while Shor defends painting (and critics who say that "painting is dead". Being a painter, I agree with Schor that there is no reason painting needs to end - or that the "art world" should not take it seriously. Just when (because?) women have better access to the medium and possibly to cultural influence. There will always be newer media, but the way I see it, the possibilities for painting have never been so open. 

From Schor:
"That ground was rendered female was never in doubt. Painting in the high Italian Renaissance increasingly became a system for ordering and subduing nature, laying a grid on chaos (femininity), which in the twentieth century became of process of razing and ashalting. For if the ground began to move and "if the 'objejct'" started to speak? Which also means beginning to 'see,' etc. What disaggregation of the subject would that entail? It might entail the death of the end-of-painting scenario, which should have been played only once according to late modernist critics, and which is to be endlessly resimulated by postmodernists. The narrative of the death of painting is meant to jam the signal of other narratives, that is to say the narrative of the Other."