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.

What’s a “Work for Hire” and Why Should You Care?

A provost learns to his dismay that the university shares copyright ownership of a popular MOOC with the professor who created it. A professor finds to her surprise that students who helped produce an animation to illustrate a lecture are co-owners of the copyright. Yet another professor, who wrote and put together a video for his course, is shocked to learn that the university that employs him and the company that produced the video share copyright ownership of it—without him. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Artists Call the Shots

When Gustave Courbet organized an exhibition of his work in 1855, it was a radical act—but now artist-curators are everywhere. That raises some questions: Do the restrictions faced by institutional curators lead to more historically accurate exhibitions? Does the pluralist attitude that fosters artist-curated shows open the door to curatorial misconceptions? Are artists simply more likely to get it wrong than academic curators? (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Help Desk: Participatory Project

I’m an artist working with a poor family on a participatory project at a local museum. The family is Latino, and the project is about the members’ perceptions on art. Who might I talk to or where might I look for similar projects, or even guidance on working with this population? I’m neither Latino nor poor. (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Are Museums The Best Place to Appreciate Art?

Philippe de Montebello, the longest-serving director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its history, discusses how and why we look at art. In his new book, Rendez-vous with Art, he reflects on the importance of museums but wonders if they might be the worst possible places to look at art. (Read more from WNYC.)

Where the Time Goes

New data about time to degree in PhD programs from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences complicate some current reform efforts to help students get through graduate school faster. At the same time, the data suggest that real time to degree is shorter than many people think it is, and that it’s decreasing in some disciplines—albeit slowly. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

War Can Both Inspire and Inhibit Artistic Creativity

War can inhibit creativity. Societies engaged in conflict have fewer resources to spend on art; they also often restrict the freedom artists require. On the other hand, war can inspire creativity. Patriotic creators might feel an impulse—or receive an order—to create works intended to unite and galvanize the citizenry. Given those cross-currents, no wonder researchers have found an “ambiguous and counterintuitive relationship between war and the arts,” in the words of Karol Jan Borowiecki of the University of Southern Denmark. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)

Are There Banner Works of Art on Instagram?

For me, Instagram is a land of the midnight sun, a wide-open place that’s always lit up, bristling with visions, pictures, strangers, shooting stars, screwballs, and well-known artists posting images from everywhere, together creating this immense abstract missive or amazing rebus that seems to speak just to me, the curious curator of my own lit-up Instagramland. (Read more from Vulture.)

Learning to Love the Conference

In 2012, I was all set for the most important conference of my life. All three major branches of musicology would be there: theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists. It was going to be my last real year on the academic job market, and, despite my rapidly aging degree, I was well positioned. I had conference interviews. I had meetings scheduled with publishers. I was going to put everything into that conference. (Read more from Vitae.)