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.

Summer Survival Strategies for Adjuncts

I’ve lived through enough adjunct summers to know that things get pretty difficult financially around late July. What little money you managed to scrape together during the school year is long gone, and you’re at least two rent cycles away from the next paycheck. For adjuncts who aren’t lucky enough to score classes, the end of the summer can become a deeply stressful period of doing whatever it takes—borrowing, penny-pinching, and scouring Craigslist for odd jobs. (Read more from Vitae.)

Personal Finance in Grad School

Living on a grad student stipend is tough, but we often make it harder on ourselves if we don’t know where the money is going. By tracking our spending habits, we can get a better sense of what we value, our motivations for spending, and areas where we can save a few dollars or even a few hundred dollars. (Read more from GradHacker.)

Can an Economist’s Theory Apply to Art?

Thomas Piketty is a name on a lot of people’s lips at the moment. The French economist’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a historic survey of wealth concentration that has quickly become a go-to text for the gathering debate on income inequality. In his book, published in English last month, Piketty argues that the rich are only going to get richer as a result of free-market capitalism. The reason, he says, is simple: returns on invested capital are greater than rates of economic growth, and this has become a “fundamental force for divergence” in society. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Detroit Pension Deals Make Sale of DIA Art Less Likely—but Still Possible

Some bankruptcy experts said that it now appears increasingly unlikely that creditors will be able to get their hands on the city-owned art collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. But experts also said that even in the wake of tentative agreements between the city and Detroit retirees and pensioners, the bondholders, and others pushing hard for a sale of art still have viable legal arguments. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)

The Importance of Being a Director-Curator

For those occupying the highest positions in art institutions, spending time with the works that fill their galleries is inevitably more limited than in their earlier curatorial roles. The chance to do the job that made their name—organizing groundbreaking exhibitions or displaying exemplary scholarship—become fewer as bureaucratic demands become greater. Two directors have arguably the most demanding administrative roles in European museums—Udo Kittelmann and Nicholas Serota—both of who continue to take on lead curator roles in major shows. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

The Lost, Surprisingly Soulful Art of Corporate Identity

Before corporations, entertainment companies, sports franchises, and political parties acquired “brand narratives,” the notion of branding was a subset of a practice called “corporate identity.” CI, as it was known, required companies and design firms to develop, refine, and maintain an integrated identity system defined by laws set down in a bible known as the graphic standards manual. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

How to Earn Tenure II

So now your clock is running out. In some cases, you’ll be asked to write up a personal statement to be included in your dossier. This can be a tricky thing to write. On the one hand, it will be read by experts in your field. On the other hand, it will also be read by some people who don’t know the first thing about your field. How can you possibly write one document to serve such disparate audiences? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Confronting the Myth of the “Digital Native”

When Kaitlin Jennrich first walked into her communications seminar last fall, she had no idea that the professor already knew of her affinity for pink cars and Olive Garden breadsticks—and that she planned to share that knowledge with the class. It hadn’t taken much sleuthing on the professor’s part to uncover those inane nuggets. The eighteen-year-old freshman at Northwestern University had herself lobbed them into the public sphere, via Twitter. Her reaction, she recalls, was, “Oh, no.” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)