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.

Two Founders of Dia Sue to Stop Art Auction

Two founders of the Dia Art Foundation have taken the unusual step of going to court to try to stop the art organization from auctioning off as much as $20 million in works from its world-class holdings at Sotheby’s. The foundation has come under fire from many parts of the art world over its decision to sell the works and has defended itself by saying that it needed the money to continue to grow and to buy new artworks. (Read more from the New York Times.)

New Council to Develop Standards, Best Practices for Online Learning

Carnegie Mellon University is convening a high-powered consortium of educators, researchers, and technology-company executives that will spearhead efforts to develop standards and promote best practices in online education. The Global Learning Council—to be led by Carnegie Mellon’s president Subra Suresh—will also look for ways to leverage education-technology resources and disseminate data in an education landscape that some think is being turned on its head. (Read more from Wired Campus.)

The Twenty Most Powerless People in the Art World: 2013 Edition

Art Review recently published its art-world power list that starts with a Qatari royal and includes an artist who “doesn’t make a thing.” Hyperallergic has highlighted people, places, and things that it think deserves more attention than the rich, powerful, and well connected for its annual Powerless 20 list. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Families and Museums Demand List of Nazi-Looted Art

Jewish heirs are fighting to find out if an uncovered Nazi treasure trove contains art stolen from their families during the Holocaust. Families and museums are now demanding that German authorities publish a complete list of the $1.35 billion worth of art found hidden in a Munich storage closet so they can find out if their heirlooms have been recovered. But despite international pressure, German prosecutors are refusing to publish a full inventory of the works. (Read more from USA Today.)

Who Were the Mystery Men behind Germany’s Nazi-Looted Art Haul?

It was the art discovery that stunned the world: more than 1,400 works of art, many of them masterpieces, hidden away for over seventy years, unearthed not in a high-security vault or long-forgotten museum basement, but an anonymous apartment in an upscale German neighborhood. A vast stash of paintings by the likes of Picasso, Matisse, and Chagall, some previously unknown, others that had been presumed lost forever. (Read more from CNN.)

You Need a Website

When you first hear about a fellow academic or receive an email from a person you do not know, what do you do? How do you try to find out basic information about such a person? There is a good chance that you do an online search. Then, you likely click on one of the top results returned by the search engine. You look for information that will give you details about the person’s background, interests, education, papers, and conference presentations, or at minimum their affiliation and the focus of their work. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Wedge Driving Academe’s Two Families Apart

More than one scientist friend at the University of California, Berkeley, has complained to me recently that the stuff coming out of English departments seems pretty wacky. My friends in the English department accuse those in the STEM fields of doing anything corporations want so long as it keeps their labs going. (Read more from the Chronicle Review.)

The Art of Emoji

Digital communication, once confined to letters, numbers, and punctuation, has become a cartoonish full-color landscape littered with pictographs designed to help express emotions and ideas. But as emoji design has developed to include a growing number of icons, the pictographs have become more than as a visual aid for verbal communication, evolving into a vehicle for expression in their own right. (Read more from Slate.)