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.

Tax Court Ruling Is Seen as a Victory for Artists

If you say you are an artist, but you make little money from selling your art, can your work be considered a profession in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service? In a ruling handed down in early October by the United States Tax Court and seen by many as an important victory for artists, the answer is yes. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Can the Monograph Survive?

The first four chapters prove the scholar’s done the work, and the next two chapters—the ones “people might actually read”—present the argument. Elsewhere and in between are the reworking of the author’s dissertation and implicit tenure pitch. That’s how Timothy Burke, professor and chair of history at Swarthmore College, described the scholarly monograph during a recent forum on its future sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

An Expert Cites Dozens of Paintings as Rembrandt’s

Are there suddenly dozens more genuine Rembrandts in the world? There are if art authorities accept the findings of Ernst van de Wetering, the Dutch art historian and longtime head of the Netherlands-based Rembrandt Research Project. In its sixth and final volume, published last week, van de Wetering reattributes seventy paintings—often discounted by previous scholars as well as the institutions that own them—to the Dutch master. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)

Bonfire of the Humanities

It has long been fashionable to say that the globe is shrinking. In the wake of the telegraph, the steamship, and the railway, thinkers from the late-nineteenth century onward often wrote of space and time being annihilated by new technologies. In our current age of jet travel and the internet, we often hear that the world is flat, and that we live in a global village. Time has also been compressed. In the 1980s, this myopic vision found a name: short-termism. (Read more from Aeon.)

Will My Nonacademic Writing Come Back to Haunt Me?

As a graduate student, I have published in nonacademic venues on the topic of parenting a special-needs child. Now I am concerned that this is going to come back to haunt me on the faculty job market. Some of my professors have pressured me to quit the graduate program, assuming I couldn’t manage academia and motherhood. I kept at it, and finished my degree, but will search committees secretly think the same thing as those professors? (Read more from Vitae.)

Warburg Institute Threatened by Funding Woes

The Warburg Institute here has trained generations of scholars, who liken its world-renowned library of Renaissance and post-Classical material to an intellectual paradise. Now many scholars fear for the Warburg’s future over a funding dispute with the University of London, which has housed the collection since 1944, after it was moved from Nazi Germany. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Tate and Oil: Does the Art World Need to Come Clean about Sponsorship?

In a cramped second-floor room in an office block mostly used for immigration hearings, one of the most famous museums in the world is fighting to keep a secret. In March, the Information Commissioner ruled that Tate must, against its wishes, reveal some of what was said in meetings where the latest of several sponsorship deals with oil giant BP was discussed. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Preventing a “Digital Landfill”

University libraries need to advocate for government openness and electronic record keeping, speakers during the Association of Research Libraries fall membership conference implored, or risk the digital landscape’s becoming a “digital landfill.” The call to action emerged from a day during which members of the association debated how libraries should involve themselves in producing accessible digital resources, managing institutional data, and supporting campus innovation. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)