CAA News Today

The CAA Board of Directors met in New York on Sunday, May 6, 2012, for its spring meeting. One day before, the Executive Committee convened to hear presentations from invited guests. The following report summarizes the contents of these two meetings.

Executive Committee

The Executive Committee meeting featured two invited speakers. The first, Raym Crow of the Chain Bridge Group, presented the first phase of the Publications Analysis, a report that is exploring the online development of CAA’s two print journals. He announced the results from a survey of individual CAA members to determine their interest in receiving online and/or print journals. The majority of members, Crow disclosed, prefer both options. He also offered findings from a thorough financial risk analysis, should institutional online subscriptions cannibalize individual memberships. In the analysis’s next phase, Crow will assess the production costs of The Art Bulletin and Art Journal and compare CAA’s business model to others in academic publishing. The resulting baseline figures will be used to determine the future direction of journal publications. Crow anticipates that it will take about six to eight months to complete this stage.

The second presenter, Gretchen Wagner, general counsel of ARTstor and a member of CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, discussed the current state of guidelines for fair use of copyrighted materials in the arts and humanities, including two documents recently created by the Visual Resources Association and the Association of Research Libraries that were endorsed by CAA in February 2012. She described how many academic and professional organizations for library science, video, poetry, and dance have developed fair-use guidelines for their fields; she also talked about OpenCourseWare. Some have noted that US courts increasingly rely on best practices from professional organizations to interpret cases related to fair use. Therefore CAA, which represents key stakeholders—artists, art historians, museum curators, conservators, and art administrators—is uniquely positioned to develop effective guidelines for fair use of copyrighted works of art and other visual material in scholarship, art making, and related activities. (See below for more on this topic.)

Board of Directors

CAA’s incoming board president, Anne Collins Goodyear of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, warmly welcomed four recently elected board members: Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African American Studies, Harvard University; Stephanie D’Alessandro, Gary C. and Frances Comer Curator of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago; Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute; and Charles A. Wright, Professor and Chair, Department of Art, Western Illinois University. The board also accepted the resignation of Jean Miller of the University of North Texas and elected Doralynn Pines, a New York–based independent art historian and consultant to museums and libraries, to fill the remaining two years of Miller’s term. The board also appointed Roger Crum of the University of Dayton (and a CAA board member) to the Nominating Committee.

Teresa Lopez, CAA chief financial officer, presented a balanced operating budget at $4.79 million for fiscal year 2013 (July 1, 2013–June 30, 2014), which the board discussed and approved. She also distributed the organization’s IRS Form 990 for 2011. The board then approved resolution to amend CAA’s statement of investment policy and guidelines to comply with the investment standards for nonprofit corporations under the New York Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act.

Randall C. Griffin, CAA vice president for publications, presented a resolution to revise the Statement of Conflict of Interest and Confidentiality that addresses proper relationships for CAA jurors and journal editors. The board approved the resolution and adopted the revised statement.

In response to Wagner’s discussion on intellectual property at the Executive Committee meeting, Goodyear presented a resolution to establish a Task Force to Develop Fair-Use Guidelines, which the board reviewed, discussed, and approved. As the resolution states, “CAA believes that it would be appropriate to establish a set of guidelines that would document current fair-use practices in the visual arts with respect to the activities of scholarly publishing, the creation of works of art, and the curation and exhibition of works that include another’s copyrighted works.” The board anticipates that it will take the task force eighteen months to two years to develop the guidelines, using focus groups of CAA members, a community advisory group, and a legal advisory group.

Michael Fahlund, CAA deputy director, and Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs and archivist, presented an Archives Policy Statement, which the board approved. Over the past two years, Stark has led the establishment of an archive of CAA records, which is available to scholars.

For further information, or if you have questions or have advocacy issues you would like to bring to the board’s attention, please contact Anne Collins Goodyear, board president, and Linda Downs, executive director and chief executive officer, at info@collegeart.org.