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.

Museum under Fire for Selling Its Art

If the Delaware Art Museum has a signature painting, surely it is Howard Pyle’s Marooned (1909), which shows a pirate near death, curled up on a sand bar, a tiny figure enveloped by a burning yellow sky. The painting refers to the old custom of punishing insubordinates by shoving them off a ship and onto an island. But these days, you can also view Marooned as a curiously precise description of the museum, which has been ostracized by its peers. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Writing the Book on Reinventing the Book

Over more than five centuries, books have evolved from collections of folded and gathered pages bound between covers to collections of screens connected to a digital cloud. Yet despite the rise in tablet and ebook usage, print persists. Advocates of hard copy continue to make physical books that fill what few bookstores remain. In other words, the state of books today is multifaceted. How can someone possibly make predictions about the future of books? (Read more from the Atlantic.)

Know the Vital Players in Your Career: You

In more than twenty years of working in academe, I have seen innumerable people sabotage their own careers through terrible mistakes. A bad outcome is sometimes due to chance or forces beyond your control, but the single most important factor determining whether you achieve your career goals, including tenure and promotion, is you. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Giving Up the Good

Normally I’d be designing a syllabus right now. I’d be waiting to receive my finalized teaching schedule and telling interested students that they will learn which sections are mine as soon as I do. I’d be going over annotated texts to refresh my memory on topics for the first few weeks of class discussion. But none of that is happening this year. It’s not happening because I’m not teaching. Spring semester was my final term in the classroom as an adjunct. (Read more from Vitae.)

Tenure at Small Colleges

Advice on how to earn tenure usually focuses on what one would expect: teaching, scholarship, and service. Much of this advice is geared toward faculty who work at research-focused institutions. Generic advice columns about earning tenure and promotion offer some useful tips but often fail to capture the nature of faculty work and expectation so often found at small liberal-arts colleges, whose nature of faculty work is different from that at research-focused institutions. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Shared Shelf Commons Now Offers More Than 100,000 Free Files

The number of free images and video in Shared Shelf Commons, an open-access library of digital media, has now topped 100,000. The files come from institutions that subscribe to Shared Shelf, Artstor’s web-based service for cataloging and managing digital collections. (Read more from Artstor Blog.)

Socially Engaged Arts Undervalued, Say Practitioners

The majority of socially engaged arts practitioners feel their work is not valued by the sector as a whole and that there is not enough understanding of its benefits, a new survey has shown. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s ArtWorks Evaluation Survey of Artists also reveals that artists working in community, participatory, and socially engaged settings rely heavily on informal training, with codes of practice and standards neglected by employers, commissioners, and artists alike. (Read more from Arts Professional.)

Museums See Different Virtues in Virtual Worlds

This is an account about how two New York museums seized this dream—and how one of them clings to it still, while the other has found that the internet’s true value isn’t in being everywhere but in enhancing the here. They are the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, both ambitious cosmopolitan art institutions but with rather different reputations: the Met an isle in the global archipelago of leading museums, the Brooklyn Museum more rooted in local soil. Yet, for all their differences, they shared a world-conquering dream some years ago. (Read more from the New York Times.)