The Standpoint of Art ⁄ Criticism: Cindy Sherman as Feminist Artist?* Jessica Sprague-Jones, Indiana University Joey Sprague, University of Kansas Feminist Standpoint Theory identifies knowledge as a social product developed from a specific social position. We apply this theory to explore the dominant standpoint informing the social organization of Western art via an institution we call art ⁄ criticism. We find that the assumptions, values, and analytic strategies informing mainstream art and art criticism express the standpoint of privileged men. As a test of our argument, we consider the case of an artist who is often hailed as a feminist artist and yet is one of the most successful woman artists today: Cindy Sherman. We find that while Sher- man is working with some fertile possibilities for feminist analysis, her work ends up re-directing this potential into a disempowering play with images. We conclude that rather than countering our argument, the celebration of Sherman’s work as feminist reveals the workings, as well as the limits, of the privileged male standpoint in art. Standpoint Theorists have examined the content and structure of scientific knowledge and found systematically gendered patterns in the world views they offer. The underlying assumptions, analytic categories, and priorities of West- ern science and social science generally tend to legitimate, or at least to repro- duce, the hegemony of economically and racially privileged men (c.f., Collins 2000; Connell 2007; Harding 1998; Mohanty 1991; Mies and Shiva 1993; Smith 1990; Sprague 2005). We extend this project in the sociology of knowledge to the construction of knowledge in art as a social institution in the contemporary United States. We ask: what does the social organization of art communicate to us about ourselves and the world we live in and how do these lessons refract existing relations of power? In this article, we argue that the social organization of art, via an institution we call art ⁄ criticism, places constraints on the menu of meanings available to us in art, particularly meanings that support gender equality. Because the success of feminist artists within the institution of art ⁄ criti- cism represents a potential challenge to our argument, we briefly consider the case of an artist who is often lauded as feminist and yet is arguably the most Sociological Inquiry, Vol. 81, No. 4, November 2011, 404–430 Ó 2011 Alpha Kappa Delta DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-682X.2011.00385.x