A museum in Australia can bar men from the ‘Ladies Lounge’ exhibition, a regional top court says

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — A museum in Australia was within its rights to bar men from a controversial art exhibit for women meant to underscore their exclusion from segments of the male-dominated society, a top regional court said on Friday.

The development is the latest in the long-running saga of the “Ladies Lounge” exhibition that has provoked an uproar in the art world. Its curator, Kirsha Kaechele, admitted in June she had created all the art, including the paintings she had billed for years as works by Spanish master Pablo Picasso without anyone noticing they were fake.

On Friday, Tasmania’s Supreme Court threw out on appeal an order for Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art, where the exhibit opened in 2020, to stop refusing male patrons entry to the show. It said the lower tribunal should have found that the “Ladies Lounge” was exempt from Australia’s gender discrimination law.

The appeals court asked Tasmania’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal to reconsider its ruling from April in the case brought by a disgruntled male visitor. It wasn’t immediately clear when the case would be revisited.

Associate Justice Shane Marshall wrote in his ruling Friday that the lower body was wrong when it decided the exhibition did not qualify for an exemption to gender discrimination laws. The exhibition was intended to promote equal opportunity for women — who suffer ongoing gender disadvantage — by excluding men, he said.

When the museum first lost the suit, Kaechele relocated the paintings to a women’s restroom at the gallery — rather than allow male visitors to see the art.

The fracas, however, continued, with the Guardian newspaper eventually questioning the authenticity of the art work after the museum published a