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.

Great Colleges to Work For 2015

This special issue features results of the Chronicle’s eighth annual Great Colleges to Work For survey, based on responses from nearly 44,000 campus employees. The survey found that at colleges recognized for a strong workplace culture, employees were more likely to feel acknowledged, supported, well informed by their leaders, and engaged in a common mission. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

UK Copyright Amendment Provokes Controversy in the Art and Design World

The British government has recently moved to repeal section 52 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Removing this section would increase the copyright duration for artistic designs—as opposed to traditional artistic works—from twenty-five years from the year the designs were first marketed to the more common term of life of the author plus seventy years. The new arrangement has stirred up controversy in the process. (Read more from Center for Art Law.)

Help Desk: Selling Out

Recently a design firm approached me about a project that involves artists painting on small refrigerators from which energy drinks will be sold. There will be a gallery exhibition of these fridges before they are distributed to various retail outlets in major cities around the country. The pay is pretty good, though not what I would ideally get for a painting of that size. Will I be committing an ethical transgression if I participate in this promotion? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Peter J. Cohen Trumpets the Art of Amateur Photography

Waiting for a companion at a Chelsea flea market in New York in the early 1990s, Peter J. Cohen thumbed through a bin of bygone snapshots, torn out of discarded family albums. He didn’t know what attracted him to the images—he’d never been interested in vintage photography and wasn’t the type to reach for a camera to document his own life—but, on a whim, he purchased five of them for $8. When he got home and inspected the photographs more closely, he knew right away that he wanted to return to the flea market to buy more. (Read more from the Boston Globe.)

You Can’t Hurry Greatness

In 1990, the psychologist John Hayes proposed the “ten-year rule,” arguing that even someone with enormous creative potential needs to spend a decade working on his or her craft before producing work of lasting merit. In a newly published paper, Richard Hass of Philadelphia University and Robert Weisberg of Temple University reevaluate this rule by looking at the careers of some of America’s most enduringly popular artists: five composers from the Great American Songbook era. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)

Mentoring as a Tenure Criterion

Purdue University, like most colleges and universities, evaluates faculty members up for tenure on their accomplishments in research, teaching, and service. Like most research universities, research has tended to be prominent. But university administrators recently told the Purdue board of plans to make significant changes in those criteria. Coming first will be an expectation that faculty members are active mentors to undergraduates, especially to at-risk students. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Museums’ Disturbing Transformation: Relentless Commercialization

For-profit art dealers are organizing shows for nonprofit museums. Museum professionals are organizing shows for commercial art fairs and galleries. Museum collections are being monetized, rented out for profit to other museums and private corporations. Corporations are co-organizing museum shows. In fact, so commonplace is the boundary-blurring that few any longer notice. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

Modeling the Behavior We Expect in Class

We should be thinking about social learning theory in the context of the college classroom. Although so-called observational learning now has widespread acceptance and a fair amount has been written about the benefits of modeling in the grade-school classroom, there is surprisingly little out there on the topic for college instructors. (Read more from Vitae.)