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.

I’m Paid Less Than My Colleagues. Help!

I’m in the biological sciences at an R1 school and am a relatively new full professor. Recently, I was shown the mean salary for all faculty at this rank within my department. To my surprise, my salary was about 20 percent less than this number. Meanwhile the mean salary for full professors in my department is approximately 6 percent lower than the average provided by the Chronicle’s latest salary report for my university. (Read more from Vitae.)

Havana’s Vital Biennial Was Trumped by a Stifled Voice

The Havana Biennial raised the right questions in a society that continues to define itself, despite a creeping capitalist economy, as seriously socialist. How can a vital art be made for sharing rather than for private ownership? Who is allowed to decide what is art and what is not? And how, in a period that almost everyone acknowledges to be one of transition, do you create an art in progress, an art that can exist in the public realm and reflect the present, without being prematurely monumental? (Read more from the New York Times.)

Against Students

What do I mean by “against students”? By using this expression I am trying to describe a series of speech acts that consistently position students, or at least specific kinds of students, as a threat to education, free speech, civilization, even life itself. In speaking against students, these speech acts also speak for more or less explicitly articulated sets of values: freedom, reason, education, democracy. Students are failing to reproduce the required norms of conduct. (Read more from the New Inquiry.)

Heartbroken: Seventy-Two USC Alumni Write in Support of Withdrawn MFA Students

More than six-dozen alumni of the Roski School of Art and Design at USC published an open letter supporting the class of MFA students that withdrew from the university in May to protest changes in curriculum, faculty, and funding. “As alumni of the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design’s Master of Fine Arts Program,” reads the letter, “we are dismayed to hear that Dean Erica Muhl’s actions and lack of support for the Program have caused the entire graduating class of 2016 to withdraw.” (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

Art Teachers “Paid the Same as McDonald’s Workers”

As President Obama announced plans to extend overtime pay to more US workers, many artists and nonprofit organizations are pushing for wage increases, including Andrea Bowers, an artist and senior lecturer at the Otis College of Art and Design. “Faculty are making the same amount as McDonald’s workers,” she says. Instructors are paid per course with a semester-long fee, but this hovers around minimum wage, if the number of hours spent on the course is taken into consideration. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

What Startups Can Learn from the Art Market

Although the denizens of Art Basel and the participants in Y Combinator may protest, the process of making art today is essentially identical to the process of making startups. Both the gallery and the incubator are singular spaces specifically designed to do the same thing: maximize volatility and promote creativity within a network of makers, gatekeepers, investors, marketers, and ultimately consumers. Guiding the players at the center is the Curator-Patron—the art dealer or the angel investor/venture capitalist. (Read more from Fast Company.)

The Fine Art of Forgery

In the radiant blue chamber of the ZPrinter 850, a skull is born. An inkjet arm moves across a bed of gypsum powder, depositing a layer of liquid that binds the powder together in the shape of a cranial cross-section. Then the arm sweeps across again, brushing on another thin layer of powder, followed by another layer of liquid, indistinguishable from the first, its imprint as abstract as a coffee stain on a napkin. Watching this process is akin to watching a movie with a slide projector—it’s slow. But after twelve hours and 1,500 layers, a technician will reach into the dust and pull out an impeccably structured replica of a hominid skull. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

Older and on the Market

Searching for employment tends to make people anxious about the ways in which they are different from the typical candidate. One such factor is age, especially if you are older than average on the market. I heard from two readers who had such concerns. One wrote: “A growing number of us earn PhDs post-40, post-50. I’m 58. I’ve been told pointblank not to even think of applying for conventional teaching positions.” (Read more from Vitae.)