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.

Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education

While the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education are currently in force, an Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) task force is extensively revising them in 2013–14. The existing standards, reviewed by the ACRL standards committee and approved by the organization’s board on January 18, 2000, were also endorsed by the American Association for Higher Education and the Council of Independent Colleges. (Read more from Association of College and Research Libraries.)

5,400 Images from the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections Now Available as Open Content

Imagine being able to pore over a sketchbook by Jacques-Louis David in minute detail, to investigate Maya, Aztec, and Zapotec ruins in Mexico, or to study the costumes and social mores at Versailles. All of these things are possible with a major addition to the Open Content Program, which includes 5,400 artwork images from the collections of the Getty Research Institute—bringing the total number of available images to over 10,000. (Read more from the Getty Iris.)

The Correlation between Free and Digital Open Access

The most important thing art museums do is make their collections, exhibitions, programs, and scholarship available to the broadest possible public. When it comes to measuring success and mission fulfillment by that last part—accessibility—Los Angeles–area museums are on a roll. (Read more from Modern Art Notes.)

The New Players: How Artist Foundations Influence the Art World

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation represents a rarely discussed dividend of the high-flying postwar and contemporary art market: the growing number of nonprofit artist foundations that burnish the legacies of their creators and provide an invaluable benefit to artists and arts organizations as grant- and gift-giving entities. (Read more from Blouin Artinfo.)

Is Art to Blame for Gentrification?

Bold Tendencies is the art space and cocktail bar standing imperiously on top of a Peckham multistory car park. It is charged with so much architectural symbolism it’s almost funny: a sky-high contemporary gallery in one of London’s poorest districts, packed each evening with painfully well-dressed young white people supping Campari bitters, who gaze down upon the streets of pound shops, mobile phone stalls, and cheap clothes stores below. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Are Artists to Blame for Gentrification?

The current narrative—in newsrooms, in think tanks, in studios and galleries—has art at the bleeding edge of urban transformation. But this narrative is wrong—or at least it keeps getting told in the wrong way. In the 1960s, shortly after the term “gentrification” was coined by the British sociologist Ruth Glass, the experimental art guru George Maciunus converted the large spaces in deindustrialized SoHo into artist cooperatives and live/work spaces, touching off its ultimate conversion into the gleaming nexus of air-brushed boutiques and tony restaurants that it is today. City leaders were so impressed that they wanted to do it again, and ever since the magical power of art to make over cities has been a key talking point. (Read more from Slate.)

Making It Past the First Round

For a high school basketball coach, the hardest part of the job is making the cuts—especially when there are more deserving kids than uniform jerseys, and the differences between the fifteenth player and the sixteenth are minuscule. But when you walk into the gym on the first day of tryouts and see the dozens of hopefuls, most of whom have no chance of making the team, all you want to do is eliminate as many as possible, as quickly as possible, so you can get down to the hard work of making a final roster. I’ve experienced similar feelings as a search-committee member, looking at 150 or more applications for three or four full-time positions. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Digital Takeover: Not If but When

We are so accustomed to the big, glossy, full-color art book that it seems that this tool of art history, not to mention the art trade, has been with us forever. But books of this kind only really took off following the revolution in color printing that happened soon after the First World War. Now, thanks to the inexorable march of technology, things are changing again. Digital art books are becoming inevitable, for pretty much the same reasons that the printed book replaced the medieval illuminated manuscript. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)