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.

W.A.G.E. Certification

Working Artists and the Greater Economy has launched W.A.G.E. Certification, a paradigm-shifting model for the remuneration of artistic labor in the nonprofit sector. W.A.G.E. Certification is a program that publicly recognizes nonprofit arts organizations that demonstrate a history of, and commitment to, voluntarily paying artist fees—it is also the first of its kind in the US that establishes a sector-wide minimum standard for compensation, as well as a clear set of guidelines and standards for the conditions under which artistic labor is contracted. (Read more from e-flux.)

Tenure Track Wisdom, Part 3

In the third of this series of faculty interviews, we hear from Steph Hinnershitz, who just started her second year as an assistant professor of history at Valdosta State University in southern Georgia. (Read more from Vitae.)

Indicting Higher Education in the Arts and Beyond

There’s one very clear take-away from the latest report released by the collective BFAMFAPhD: people who graduate with arts degrees regularly end up with a lot of debt and incredibly low prospects for earning a living as artists. Or, as they put it in the report, titled Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists, “the fantasy of future earnings in the arts cannot justify the high cost of degrees.” (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Unbound: The Politics of Scanning

The romanticized image of the scanner is based on the assumption that by scanning and uploading we make information available, and that that is somehow an invariably democratic act. Scanning has become synonymous with transparency and access. But does the document dump generate meaningful analysis, or make it seem insignificant? (Read more from Rhizome.)

Intentional Conferencing

Conferences are not cheap. They are exhausting and usually require you to travel. You are taking time away from work, which means risking feeling behind when you return. You arrive home sleep-deprived, information-overloaded, and struggling to play catch-up. So why do we go? We attend conferences to learn, network, and take new ideas back to our institutions. Does this always happen? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Teaching and the University of Tomorrow

Last week, I attended the De Lange Conference held at Rice University every other year, this time on “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow.” The future-oriented theme had both intrigued me, and left me a little skeptical. But ultimately I was won over by the chance to attend, for the first time, a conference exclusively focused on teaching. I would be able to talk shop about learning and pedagogy. Like many other academics, I’m concerned about what the university of tomorrow might become. (Read more from Vitae.)

Everybody’s an Art Curator

This winter, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History will feature an exhibit of works relating to the ocean, with paintings and sculptures by established artists alongside works by local residents. According to a call for submissions, that includes not just watercolors of Pacific sunsets, but “that awesome GoPro footage you took while surfing” and “your two-year-old’s drawing of the beach that’s been on the fridge for five months.” Museums are increasingly outsourcing the curation of their exhibits to the public—sometimes even asking the crowd to contribute art, too. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)

Seeking a Postdoc

An advice seeker writes, “My adviser tells me not even to bother applying for postdocs—the competition is too intense. Is that true?” Of course you can apply for postdocs. Yes the competition is fierce, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. As you craft your application, make sure that it proves four key things: that your research is legitimate, necessary, and viable, and that it meets the needs (or advances the mission) of the hosting laboratory, department, campus, or program. (Read more from Vitae.)