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.

The Tall Task of Unifying Part-Time Professors

Robert Yoshioka, a representative of the California Part-Time Faculty Association, is one of many who are agitating for better wages and greater job security for adjunct, part-time, and contingent faculty, who often don’t know whether they’ll be hired back until a few weeks before the semester starts. But as he and his fellow activists prepare for a National Adjunct Walkout Day on February 25—the first nationwide protest of its kind—he is running into a problem: it’s hard to organize a loose collection workers who are hired and fired at will. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

Excuses, Excuses

What’s the most common reason people who want to attend the arts don’t follow through? Time. Or, more accurately, the lack of it. Not surprised? According to the American Time Use Survey, 95 percent of Americans over the age of fifteen participate in leisure activities for an average of five hours a day. Nonetheless, the perception that they lack time keeps them from participating in a host of available activities, and the arts are no exception. (Read more from the National Arts Marketing Project.)

The Art of Twitter Art

Welcome to the world of Twitter art, a whimsical, boundless space dominated by image-generator bots and ASCII character codes and hand-drawn cartoons. Twitter art appears unexpectedly in streams. Twitter art is experimental. Twitter art even interacts with other Twitter art. But Twitter art’s creators face a tricky challenge: they work on a site designed primarily for posting limited text, so users rarely stop and stare at tweets the way they might pause to appreciate other visual-art forms. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

The Rise and Fall of a Midwestern Art Magazine

In 1973 Derek Guthrie was fired as an art critic from the Chicago Tribune. There was “under-the-table censorship” occurring, as he called it in his introduction to the recent New Art Examiner Anthology. Chicago, by many accounts, was a cultural backwater. Why not just move to New York and fall in with like-minded individuals in a thriving art scene? Why did he stay in Chicago and found the New Art Examiner? (Read more from F Magazine.)

92 Percent of College Students Prefer Reading Print Books to Ereaders

Despite the embrace of ebooks in certain contexts, ereaders remain controversial. Many people just don’t like them: ereaders run out of battery, they hurt your eyes, and they don’t work in the bath. After years of growth, sales are stagnating. In 2014, 65 percent of six- to seventeen-year-old children said they would always want to read books in print—up from 60 percent two years earlier. (Read more from the New Republic.)

What’s Wrong with the Public Intellectual?

For years, the undigitized gem of American journals had been Partisan Review. Last year its guardians finally brought it online. Some of its mystery has been preserved, insofar as its format remains hard to use, awkward, and hopeless for searches. Even in its new digital form it retains a slightly superior pose. (Read more from the Chronicle Review.)

Is a New Artistic Activism Emerging via Social Media and Forms of Public Protest?

Recent world crises have elicited an unprecedented response on social media and brought on new forms of artistic protest. Think of the brave Mexican artists who have been standing naked in public to protest student killings, shared everywhere online, or take a look at the pictures below for a visual recap of other artistic protest projects over the past few months. They got me thinking: is a new artistic activism emerging via social media and forms of public protest? (Read more from Artnet News.)

Museum Rules: Talk Softly, and Carry No Selfie Stick

In a famous lab trial, a chimp named Sultan put two interlocking sticks together and pulled down an elusive prize, a bunch of bananas hanging just out of arm’s reach. Nearly a century later, eager tourists have conducted their own version of the experiment. Equipped with the camera extender known as a selfie stick, occasionally referred to as “the wand of narcissism,” they can now reach for flattering CinemaScope selfies wherever they go. (Read more from the New York Times.)