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.

How to Document Heritage Sites under Threat

A major conference in Berlin to be held November 19–20 will bring together advocates to discuss how digital technology is being used to preserve the world’s heritage sites. “Resilience through Innovation” has been organized by CyArk, a California-based nonprofit organization that uses digital scanning to create a free-to-access online three-dimensional archive of heritage sites. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Ten Art-World Survival Tips They Didn’t Teach You in School

So you want to get a master of fine arts degree. But how well will your MFA program prepare you for life as a professional artist? The number of graduates from art MFA programs has doubled from 1987 to 2012, while BFA graduates have nearly tripled during the same time frame. Artnet News asked current students and recent graduates to share their advice for getting ahead. (Read more from Artnet News.)

A Look at the Museum of the Future

Museums are flirting with change that may be more revolutionary than at any other point in their history. The forces rocking the technology world—cheaper screens, miniaturized mechanics, and increased computing power—are prompting a rich period of experimentation in exhibition design. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)

The Digital Innovations Seven LA Museums Are Most Excited About

Even though museum collections often go back hundreds—even millions—of years, these visitor-reliant institutions must stay relevant in the twenty-first century. There is healthy debate about how much technology is too much, and when and where within a museum it is appropriate to use technology, but there is little debate about the fact that technology is here to stay. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

Back to the Drawing Board: The Crafty Art Students Rejecting Digital

Once it had connotations of classroom cutting and sticking or haberdashery departments, but today the word “craft” represents a movement of makers investing time in mastering skills, experimenting with design, and laboring over one handmade object at a time. Against a backdrop of the 3D printing revolution, craft is still going strong, and many young people across the UK are still interested in learning traditional techniques such as stone carving, silver smithing, and wood work. (Read more from the Guardian.)

For Obamas, a More Abstract Choice of Art

This past summer, President Barack Obama spent nearly an hour at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the nation’s largest repository of paintings and sketches by Edward Hopper. He also could have seen a few Hoppers at home. Two of the artist’s classic depictions of the American landscape—Cobb’s Barns, South Truro and Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro—now hang on the southeast side of the Oval Office and are part of a years-long shift by Obama and his wife, who have put their more modern aesthetic imprint on the White House. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Going through the Motions? The 2015 Survey of Faculty Workplace Engagement

Employee engagement is an important metric that can gauge how loyal and intrinsically interested people are in their work. So how engaged are faculty members, and how do they compare to other kinds of workers? A new Inside Higher Ed survey suggests that while faculty members over all aren’t actively engaged in their work, those at smaller, private institutions tend to be the most emotionally and intellectually connected to what they do. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Academic Book as Expensive, Nihilistic Hobby

I just got word from my editor at Northwestern University Press that my first (and last) academic monograph, Kafka and Wittgenstein, has been sent to the printer. My feelings about this range from mild pride, to medium-grade nihilism, to wide-ranging annoyance at a publication model that still depends on a tenure system that is largely extinct. (Read more from Vitae.)