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.

Actual Raises for Faculty

Tenured and tenure-track faculty members at four-year colleges and universities are receiving raises this year that exceed the increase in the cost of living, according to a study that was released by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The study found that the median increase in base salary is 2.1 percent, and that the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index for the period was 1.5 percent. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Average Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty at Four-Year Colleges, 2013–14

Law, business, and engineering again topped the list of the most lucrative disciplines for professors. But professors of theology and religious vocations saw one of the largest increases in salary, about 8 percent from 2012–13 to 2013–14. Where did the humanities and visual arts rank this year? (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

DIA Grand Bargain Could Prove to Be a Work of Art, but Not a Done Deal

In 1919, with the Detroit Institute of Arts in dire financial straits and Detroit’s economy booming, museum leaders ceded ownership of the art and building to city hall in exchange for annual funding. Nearly a century later, history is preparing to do a somersault. Detroit is now bankrupt, DIA is more financially stable than it has been in decades, and the museum stands on the brink of being spun off into an independent charitable trust that would once again own the collection and building. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)

No More Silence of the Scholars

A bill introduced in the New York State Legislature seeks to protect art experts from what it describes as “frivolous” lawsuits. The proposed legislation aims to make it more difficult for owners, auctioneers, and dealers to bring lawsuits against art historians simply because they do not like their opinions. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Museum Object Portfolio Performance

Most of us have some experience teaching with art “in the flesh”—in museums or galleries—rather than our usual fallback of classroom PowerPoint, Offline Image Viewer, which is ARTstor’s presentation technology, or Prezi presentations. And we often send students to a local museum or university gallery to write responses of one sort or another, giving them direct access to the original artwork. But in my undergraduate museum-studies class this semester, I wanted my students to consider the variety of ways that text can be used to introduce, augment, and/or constrain our response to the original object. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

The Ten Weirdest Artworks Ever

From sexy heels trussed and presented on a silver platter to Damien Hirst’s formaldehyde shark, the Guardian presents a tour through some of the strangest, most shocking surrealist art around. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Hoard d’Oeuvres: Art of the 1 Percent

Art collecting is the most esteemed form of shopping in our culture today. And in today’s digital economy, you can monitor this primal battle of achieving egos as it unfolds in real time, on computer screens. At auction you watch incomparable works of art vanish into exchange value: all that’s solid truly melts into air. The spectacle of yen, dollars, and euros mounting on the screen climaxes in the money shot: the sale price. (Read more from the Baffler.)

The Joys and Perils of Artistic Collaborations

Artists aren’t exactly known for their accommodating, easygoing ways. More often, it’s words such as “egocentric” and “introverted” that spring to mind. In reality, though, few artists work in total isolation, especially once they have achieved a certain level of success. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have teams of assistants making their work—yet these assistants can hardly be called collaborators. At the other end of the fame scale, collaboration is crucial for so-called emerging artists, through sharing materials and workspaces and exchanging ideas. (Read more from the Financial Times.)