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.

Nazi-Looted Art “Found in Munich”

A collection of 1,500 artworks confiscated by the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s has been found in the German city of Munich. The trove is believed to include works by Matisse, Picasso, and Chagall, the news magazine Focus reports. Some of the works were declared as degenerate by the Nazis, while others were stolen from or forcibly sold for a pittance by Jewish art collectors. If confirmed, it would be one of the largest recoveries of looted art. (Read more from BBC News.)

Painting Thought to Be by Delacroix Discovered in Santa Barbara

Eik Kahng, curator at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, believes she has identified a previously unknown painting by Eugène Delacroix. Given the stature of the French Romantic innovator, that’s no small thing. The painting turned up in a local private collection—the Van Asch van Wyck Trust—and Kahng has now included it in her newly opened exhibition, Delacroix and the Matter of Finish. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

So Many Stories to Tell for Met’s Digital Chief

After teaching a generation of journalists at Columbia University about how technology was changing journalism and how they needed to change along with it, Sree Sreenivasan became the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first chief digital officer in August. He was in a similar role at Columbia for more than a year before moving to the Met, where he will oversee seventy people working across multiple departments. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Hurricane Sandy, One Year Later

The predictable chaos and lack of information are the outcome of any disaster, but one year after Sandy (which killed 150 people and damaged or destroyed some 650,000 houses), officials, charities, and disaster experts are concluding that much can be done to smooth the recovery process—and that there’s more for architects to do other than drive-by damage assessments and holding empty “ideas” competitions. Now architects are working in neighborhoods to link people to the resources they need. (Read more from the Architectural Record.)

Who Are You, Really?

Employment-related screening tools were the focus of conversation in the human-resources class I teach. As I expected, there were plenty of questions about how employers use internet searches to make decisions about applicant suitability and a fair amount of outrage about how completely unfair employers are when it comes to using digital content to make hiring decisions. (Read more from On Hiring at the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Understanding Cover Letters

Recently, on a listserv in my field known for being welcoming to outsiders and newcomers but also for being rife with discussions that quickly turn ridiculous, a thread on cover letters followed the usual pattern: a new grad student asks what seems to be an innocuous question, a few professors offer semihelpful responses without getting too sucked in, the rogue academic contributes some tongue-in-cheek humor, a few more grad students take the jokes seriously and panic, and the list erupts in false information and rumors. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Gay Student to Lose His Virginity in Live Sex Performance for Art

A gay student plans to lose his virginity live onstage—all in the name of art. Clayton Pettet, a 19-year-old art student at Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design in London, plans to have gay sex in front of a crowd of between fifty and one hundred people in London on January 25, 2014, for a project called Art School Stole My Virginity. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

As Street Art Grows More Popular, Is It Losing Its Edge?

New York City is a mecca for art, but the latest exhibition drawing crowds isn’t located in a museum—this show is taking place on the streets of the five boroughs, in places you wouldn’t expect art to hang. This particular work, called Waiting in Vain at the Door of the Club, is a piece by a man who goes by the name Banksy, an English-born street artist, and who prefers to remain incognito. (Read more from PBS.)