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.

Leonardo da Vinci Painting Lost for Centuries Found in Swiss Bank Vault

It was lost for so long that it had assumed mythical status for art historians. Some doubted whether it even existed. But a five-hundred-year-old mystery was apparently solved after a painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci was discovered in a Swiss bank vault. The painting, which depicts Isabella d’Este, a Renaissance noblewoman, was found in a private collection of four hundred works kept in a Swiss bank by an Italian family who asked not to be identified. (Read more in the Telegraph.)

Why the Affordable Care Act Matters To Artists

It’s not yet clear how many people purchased insurance through the exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that opened recently. But one of the things I’ve been hearing from a lot of creative people is that the ACA has made it easy to be, or to contemplate being, an artist. (Read more from ThinkProgress.)

Decoding Job Ads

You can teach yourself about what institutions pride themselves from reading their job ads. You’ll start to notice trends in the language and structure of ads, so that you can start to group similarly worded ads together and easily spot the ads that break those patterns, or start their own, set of conventions. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Learn Art History through Ten Stunning Pairs of High Fashion Heels

The designer Nick Adelman challenged himself to encompass the art of different cultures and eras in a fashion medium, and the amount of ornate detail put into these high-heeled shoes practically begs for them to become reality. (Read more from Buzzfeed.)

Is Showing Your Art in a Co-op Gallery Worthwhile?

Last week I wrote a post about the advisability of showing your work in a vanity gallery. In the comments, it became clear that there is some confusion, or at least a blurry understanding, of the difference between a pay-for-display (vanity) gallery and cooperative (co-op) galleries. I feel it would be a good idea to expand the conversation to cover this second type of gallery. (Read more in Red Dot Blog.)

Critics Say Sting on Open-Access Journals Misses Larger Point

Perhaps months from now, when the dust settles and academics really look back at it, they’ll find some hard lessons in the elaborate Science magazine exposé this week by the journalist John Bohannon. After more than a year of work, in which Bohannon, who has a PhD in biology, crafted a fraudulent cancer-research article and painstakingly tracked the responses to it from more than three hundred journals, he gave his industry the embarrassing news that more than half of them had agreed to publish it. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Puzzling Peer Reviews

Just because scholars who seek to publish in open-access journals are open to new forms of peer review doesn’t mean they all see eye-to-eye—or know what to expect. As one sting operation shows, many such journals are unable to reject obviously flawed submissions, even as they promise thorough review processes. Meanwhile, other journals are even criticized for being too much like the traditional publishing they aim to reform. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Agony of Suspense in Detroit

It would have been hard to think of a better metaphor: A fire-breathing dragon was bearing down on the Detroit Institute of Arts. For months now, the institute has found itself confronting a threat never experienced by another American museum of its size and not of its own making: the possibility that parts of its world-class collection will be forcibly sold off to help pay billions in debt owed by the city, now in federal bankruptcy. (Read more in the New York Times.)