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.

Guardian of the Humanities

William “Bro” Adams is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency that awards grants to researchers and cultural institutions to preserve America’s heritage. In an interview with Tom Fox, he discussed his mission at the NEH and his views on leading this federal organization. (Read more from the Washington Post.)

The NEA at 50 and the Death of the Public Good

Fifty years after the National Endowment for the Arts was founded, the agency struggles, doing great work despite being the victim of an unrelenting and highly successful conservative assault on the public sector that began with the election of Ronald Reagan and continues to this day. The NEA’s 2015 budget allocation clocked in at a mere $146 million, which accounts for 0.012 percent of total federal discretionary spending. (Read more from Culturebot.)

How an Art-History Class Became More Engaging with Twitter

When I was a college student, art-history courses revolved around a 1960s-era carousel slide projector. Its monotonous humming and clicking in the darkened lecture hall often put my classmates to sleep. As I prepared to teach my own art-history course last year, I wanted to implement new technologies to make the lectures more interactive and relatable to a twenty-first-century audience. (Read more from the Conversation.)

Can I Reuse a Past Show’s Title?

I’m a painter and had an exhibition in another state two months ago that comprised many of the pieces in the one I’m installing at a new gallery in a few weeks. Can or should I give the show the same title? Or should I come up with something new, since I’m showing some new work too? (Read more from Burnaway.)

Art Forgers Beware: DNA Could Thwart Fakes

Eric Fischl remembers the time a friend waved a catalogue at him to alert him that one of his paintings was up for auction for six figures. In reality, the work was a fake, but so convincing, the artist said, “I thought I was losing my mind.” Brushes with forgery like that one two decades ago, and concerns about his legacy and estate, prompted Fischl to appear in London to vouch for a new authentication system that would let artists sign their works with specks of synthetic DNA. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Copyright Registration Strategies

Copyright registration is something most artists can experiment without legal assistance and great cost, outside of more complex registration questions. However, this does not really help individual artists or small businesses who produce a lot of content. So let’s break it down and then you can make your own conclusions about how cheap and easy it is, depending on what type of content you are registering. (Read more from Clancco.)

On the Case: The Law on Augmented Reality and Museums

A few of our more tech-savvy museum clients have been exploring whether and how to make some of their exhibits come alive by using exciting new “augmented reality” technology. At the same time, they have been grappling with cutting-edge legal issues involved in this new technology—which is where we come in. (Read more from Artnet News.)

The Error of Margins: Vernacular Artists and the Mainstream Art World

Though the art world may not yet have a satisfactory way of referring to artists like Marlon Mullen, who are variously described by such leaky terms as self-taught, outsider, and vernacular, it has, over the past few years, shown more interest in them and is gradually growing the existing market for their work. (Read more from ARTnews.)