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assemble a show of art by women from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in 1995, she couldn't find enough to fill a small gallery. MoMA has more work by women now, and she could do her show from in-house stock. But she still couldn't write a history.

The Los Angeles exhibition, which has been in the works for at least a decade, does write a history, calling upon an international roster of 119 artists, most represented by work from the early 1970s. But because that history is endlessly complicated and comprehensive accounts of it few, this show is still a rough draft and its organizer, Cornelia Butler, chief curator of drawing at MoMA, will doubtless be fielding suggestions and complaints for months to come.

Doubters will ask whether the one- curator model is out of date for a globalist project of this kind. Others will question the mid-'60s-through-'70s time frame - why not longer, or shorter? - as well as why certain artists, including the many male artists informed by feminist thinking, are absent, and self-declared nonfeminists like Marina Abramovic are present.

The questions are sound, and we all have our please-add wish lists (Lenore Tawney and Rachel Rosenthal are on mine, along with many non-Western artists). Still, I hope Ms. Butler will accept thanks for pulling off the impossible with aplomb, and let the fallout be what it is: fodder for future drafts.

For me the "Wack!" of the title is a problem. It's meant to echo the acronyms of various feminist groups - WAC (Women's Art Coalition) and so on - that came and went over the years. But it plays too readily into an antic, bad-girl take on feminist art that diminishes it and makes it a joke.

On the other hand "art and the feminist revolution" is fine. Feminism was revolutionary. "Why have there been no great women artists?" asked the art historian Linda Nochlin in 1971. Because of a hierarchical social structure, built on privileged distinctions of gender, class and race that gave men, and only certain men, the time, education and material resources required to make "great" art, to become "geniuses."