CAA News Today

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Project to Put UK’s Publicly Owned Artworks Online Catalogues 200,000 Paintings

The Public Catalogue Foundation collaborated with more than three thousand venues across the United Kingdom to archive 211,861 paintings, many of which have never been photographed before. Every oil painting in public ownership is available online at the Your Paintings website—most of which are not currently on public display. Andrew Ellis, the foundation’s director, said: “No country has ever embarked on such a monumental project to showcase its entire oil painting collection online.” (Read more from the Telegraph.)

Freelance Professors

“Self-employed professor” could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them, and share the tuition revenue. In January, StraighterLine will launch fifteen professor-taught courses. This is new territory for the company, which currently offers forty-two low-cost and self-paced online courses. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Help Desk: Internship Woes

I wrote the blog for a gallery for over six months without having my name attached. The blog did very well and was picked up on by a local magazine that asked the gallery owner to contribute a regular guest column for their publication. I proceeded to plan and outline the next six months of art-related subject matter with the pretext that I would be getting paid as my internship was completed. After the internship had ended, I wrote three posts for the gallery’s blog before the owner told me it was no longer in his budget. I was never paid for those entries, and my ideas continue to be used thereafter. Where do we draw the line on our unpaid time and efforts while aspiring to get recognition for the work that we do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Harvard’s 3D-Printing Archaeologists Fix Ancient Artifacts

Indiana Jones practiced archaeology with a bullwhip and fedora. Joseph Greene and Adam Aja are using another unlikely tool: a 3D printer. Greene and Aja work at Harvard University’s Semitic Museum, using 3D printers and 3D scanning software to re-create a ceramic lion that was smashed three thousand years ago when Assyrians attacked the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nuzi, located in modern-day Iraq. (Read more from Wired.)

Are Curators a Vanishing Breed?

Strong support for California’s ambitious program to limit greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming was reconfirmed in a recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, showing once more the state’s celebrated environmental consciousness. So perhaps it’s time at least to ring a warning bell about a puzzling situation in Los Angeles’ cultural environment, rather than its natural one. At area art museums, the job of chief curator appears to be edging toward the endangered species list. Three notable chief curators have left their museum jobs in the past year. Successors are nowhere in sight. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

Friends and Rivals: Copley, West, Peale, Trumbull, and Stuart

The podcast of a lecture by Jules David Prown, recorded on October 15, 2003, presents the inaugural online offering of the Wyeth Lecture in American Art, a biennial event hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. (Read more from the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts.)

In the Thick of It

I remember September. I recall staring at the postings on H-Net and bemoaning the absence of jobs. Now it’s November, and oh, how I long for September. My friends who went on the market last year complained about applying to sixty or more jobs, but by late August I could count only fifteen or so that I could reasonably convince myself were suitable—not because the others were too far away, or the teaching load was too heavy, but because I couldn’t conceive of any way to assert that I was a good candidate. Where, I wondered, would those many additional job ads come from? (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

When Nasty Reviews Strike: What’s the Role of the Reviewer?

The question of the value of nasty reviews of cultural products has been in the news a lot lately, but it’s an issue that has been debated for as long as I can remember. I remember publishing in the Globe and Mail in about 1990 an article discouraging the writing of negative reviews of books from tiny local presses. I can’t remember exactly what my argument was, and it seems like a silly idea now. (Read more from the Globe and Mail.)