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.

Almanac of Higher Education 2013

The Chronicle of Higher Education takes the measure of higher education in its 2013–14 almanac, an annual compendium of data on colleges regarding the profession, students, diversity, finance, technology, and international issues. This year’s almanac features many new tables and charts along with the familiar ones. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

A Guide to the Web’s Growing Set of Free Image Collections

The J. Paul Getty Trust has launched its Open Content Program, making more than 4,600 high-quality images of artwork available for free online. Though works by van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Dürer had already fallen into the public domain, the Getty’s program makes their digital reproductions much easier to use. The Getty is not the first museum to put so many images online this year. The Atlantic has listed the museums and research institutions that have large, high-quality, free-to-use collections of historically or aesthetically notable images online. (Read more in the Atlantic).

Help Desk: Pressure to Review

I’m a new arts administrator and live in a midsized city. I started writing art reviews last year and now feel pressure to write about my artist friends’ work. It’s not like they are asking me directly, but hints have been dropped. I have no problem reviewing work that I think is good; the problem is that I like some people very much but don’t think their work is that great. How do I avoid reviewing work I don’t like without losing my friends? (Read more in Daily Serving.)

Christie’s Appraisal Will Reveal Value of Detroit Institute of Arts’ Collection

Art museums treat estimated values of their art like state secrets. In fact, major museums such as the Detroit Institute of Arts don’t even know precisely what all of their multi-million-dollar treasures are worth. When officials from the New York–based auction house Christie’s finish formally appraising city-owned works in Detroit this fall, the results will open an unprecedented public window into the market value of thousands of artworks at a top American museum. (Read more in the Detroit Free Press.)

Feminist Anti-MOOC

At first glance, “Feminism and Technology” sounds like another massive open online open course (MOOC) that would involve video components and be available online to anyone, with no charge. But don’t look for this course in any MOOC catalogue. “Feminism and Technology” is taking a few MOOC elements but then changing them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course (DOCC). (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

More Smiles? More Money

Last November, the artist Martha Rosler had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, an installation and performance piece called Meta-Monumental Garage Sale. It was, in fact, an enormous garage sale, with heaps of toys, furniture, clothes, and crockery arranged on a tidy maze of racks and tables winding through the museum’s main atrium. The show continued a project Rosler began in 1973 with Monumental Garage Sale, a performance she staged as a graduate student at UC San Diego and later re-created in museums all over the world. Like its predecessors, Meta-Monumental Garage Sale was a meditation on value. (Read more from N+1.)

Jasper Johns’s Assistant Charged with Stealing the Artist’s Work

In the twenty-seven years that James Meyer worked for Jasper Johns, the assistant answered the artist’s phone, stretched his canvases, bought his paintbrushes, and even drew lines on his canvases. Meyer was recently arrested for stealing at least twenty-two works from his employer and selling them through an unnamed New York gallery for $6.5 million, falsely telling the dealer and buyers that Johns had given them to him as presents and that they would be in the official catalogue raisonné. (Read more in New York Times.)

Pre-Raphaelite Mural Discovered in William Morris’s Red House

It began as an attempt to restore one blurry image that had been hidden for a century behind a large built-in wardrobe on William Morris’s bedroom wall. Months later, the painstaking removal of layers of paint and wallpaper revealed that an entire wall at the artist and craftsman’s first married home was painted by his young friends who would become world-famous Pre-Raphaelite artists. (Read more in the Guardian.)