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.

77,000 Images of Tapestries and Italian Monuments Join the Open Content Program

The Getty Research Institute has just added more than 77,000 high-resolution images to the Open Content Program from two of its most often-used collections. The largest part of the new open-content release—more than 72,000 photographs—comes from the collection Foto Arte Minore: Max Hutzel photographs of art and architecture in Italy. (Read more from the Getty Iris.)

NGA Online Editions

Available for the first time on the National Gallery of Art’s website, NGA Online Editions presents the most current, in-depth information on the museum’s collections by the world’s leading art historians along with rich capabilities for exploring that information. A customized reading environment and toolkit for managing text and images are intended both to provide scholars with a useful workspace for research and to encourage the study and appreciation of art. (Read more from the National Gallery of Art.)

As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate the Messy World of Discovery Tools

Many professors and students gravitate to Google as a gateway to research. Libraries want to offer them a comparably simple and broad experience for searching academic content. As a result, a major change is under way in how libraries organize information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialized databases—books here, articles there—many libraries are bulldozing their digital silos. They now offer one-stop search boxes that comb entire collections, Google style. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Previously Unknown Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985

A multi-institutional team of new-media artists, computer experts, and museum professionals has discovered a dozen previously unknown experiments by Andy Warhol on aging floppy disks from 1985. The purely digital images, “trapped” for nearly thirty years on Amiga floppy disks stored in the archives collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, were discovered and extracted by members of the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club, with assistance from the museum’s staff, the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the artist Cory Arcangel. (Read more from the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.)

The Happy Hour Test

Getting a job, as we all know, can prove mysterious. Just what determines if one gets the job or not? And what, for departments and committees, proves the deciding factor? If things are relatively equal by the finalist stage, and they usually are, then what? I’d contend that many, maybe most searches come down to the intangibles. And the biggest and most indefinable of them all is simply fitting in. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Why This Movie Perfectly Re-Created a Picasso, Destroyed It, and Mailed the Evidence to Picasso’s Estate

Imagine this: You’ve just spent three weeks painstakingly replicating a Picasso painting from scratch—you’ve scrutinized documentation about the artist’s creative process; you’ve practiced his brushstrokes, so your work will look convincing; you’ve even painted in noted preliminary images, then covered them up, because that’s what he did. You’ve toiled over this, all for mere seconds of screen time in a film. And then you have to destroy it. (Read more from Vanity Fair.)

Ten Steps to Becoming an Adjunct Ally

There have been plenty of word battles recently between tenure-track faculty and adjuncts as the crisis within higher education has become more publicized, and it is more important than ever that tenured and full-time allies take action in support their colleagues and students as we struggle to take back our colleges from corporate mismanagement. Here are some direct steps tenure-track and other full-time faculty can take to support adjunct faculty. (Read more from Fugitive Faculty.)

Warming Up to the Culture of Wikipedia

If ever there was the antithesis of the crowd-sourced Wikipedia, it would be a museum, where an expert picks what is seen and not seen, then carefully prepares captions explaining what each piece of art means. But while there used to be innate suspicion toward Wikipedia among museum staffs, even hostility, in recent years there has increasingly been cooperation. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors are frequently invited to spend the day at museums and archives to create and improve articles related to the works housed there. (Read more from the New York Times.)