Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into Music Videos?
- Artist: Guerrilla Girls
- Date: 2014
- Medium: Digital print on paper
- Dimensions: support: 306 x 660 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the “Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into Music Videos?” by Guerrilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous collective of women artists who first sprang to life in 1985 after seeing only 13 women out of 169 artists in a New York MoMA show. They cloak their identities in gorilla masks and adopt the names of dead female icons—Frida Kahlo, Gertrude Stein, Kathë Kollwitz—to speak out on gender, race, and sexuality in art and culture.
In 2014 this poster flips the familiar slogan into a punchy question that confronts the music‑video industry’s long‑standing demand for hypersexualized bodies. The bright pop‑pink and yellow backdrop, combined with stark statistics and biting wit, forces viewers to confront the uncomfortable reality that female performers are still expected to be naked to be seen. The work’s power lies in its simple, direct data and the way it invites us to question the institutions that keep these inequities alive.
See it in person
Do Women Have to Be Naked to Get Into Music Videos? is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
