This month’s issue of Frieze magazine is all feminism all the time. Thankfully, it’s a whole lot better than the similarly themed issue of ARTNews.

Meanwhile at the Times, Holland Cotter has been doing an impressive job covering feminist art, not just reviewing and contextualizing the various shows and symposiums, but thinking hard about what it all means. Last week he reviewed “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” at the Museum of Contemporary Art out in LA (it’ll come to P.S. 1 in Queens next year). And he has a lot to say about how the history of the related art and activism has been written and defined.

He notes a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about, the things that keep coming up in every related conversation I have with artists, activists and curators: the enduring, increasingly complicated problem of having a canon…the whole essentialism debate…inter-generational tensions…the way that feminism’s love of questions complicates coherence. Cotter writes,

The show is a thrill, rich and sustained. Just by existing, it makes history. But like any history, once written, it is also an artifact, a frozen and partial monument to an art movement that was never a movement, or rather was many movements, or impulses, vibrant and vexingly contradictory.

One thing is certain: Feminist art, which emerged in the 1960s with the women’s movement, is the formative art of the last four decades. Scan the most innovative work, by both men and women, done during that time, and you’ll find feminism’s activist, expansionist, pluralitic trace. Without identity-based art, crafts-derived art, performance art and much political art would not exist in the form it does, if it existed at all. Much of what we call postmodern art has feminist art at its source.

Yeah, I shivered a little. And then he manages as worthy and complete a definition of feminism as I think I’ve seen anywhere:

With their interest on experiencing gender – along, one must hope, with race and class – as an unfixed category, but one they control, and their interest in playing with various versions of “great,” they are exercising freedoms of choice that feminism always offered: freedom to challenge received truths, to exchange passivity for activism, to find solidarity in diversity, to adopt ambiguity and ambivalence as social and aesthetic strategies. And by doing so, they are acknowledging that the art they are making, whatever form it takes, is political by default.