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.

Here Are the Guerrilla Girls on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

The anonymous feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week and talked about gender inequality in the art world. The collective is known for wearing gorilla masks and using the names of deceased female artists as monikers. Kathe, Zubeida, and Frida were the members that spoke with Colbert. (Read more from ARTnews.)

How Advocates of African American Art Are Advancing Racial Equality in the Art World

Only a small group of African Americans occupy curatorial positions at mainstream museums, relatively few African American artists have been given major solo museum shows, and works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artists are undervalued by the art market relative to those by white artists of equal standing. Change doesn’t come organically, however. It takes individuals. (Read more from Artsy.)

New York Dealers Cannot Afford to Represent Emerging Artists

For visitors to New York art galleries who want to know why the prices are so high—or for artists who want to exhibit their work in those galleries—part of the blame may lie with the landlord, or with the real-estate market as a whole. Rents are high, averaging $100 to $200 per square foot in Chelsea and $80 to $120 on the Lower East Side. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Help Desk: Self-Promotion

I’m an artist who just got a solo show at a little gallery but have no idea how to promote it. I didn’t go to art school and don’t have a huge group of people to invite. I’m lost on how to market the show. Where do I start? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

320 Hours: Slow Looking and Visitor Engagement with El Greco

By the time the painting returned to its home in Cleveland, El Greco’s Holy Family with Saint Mary Magdalene and I had spent 320 hours and four months together. As an interpretation assistant for the Portland Art Museum, I was in the gallery four days a week, interacting with visitors, experimenting with interpretive strategies, and reflecting on this four-hundred-year-old painting. This experience gave me room to experiment with visitor engagement, changed how I approach the act of looking, and influenced my teaching outside the museum. (Read more from Art Museum Teaching.)

How to Explain Pictures to a Difficult Date

We live in an age when “kitsch” almost defies definition but is tossed around with great abandon: If Jeff Koons can turn tacky garden sculptures and gift-shop figurines into gazillion-dollar collectibles, lauded by a fair number of critics, what then becomes of kitsch? (Read more from Vasari21.)

Getting Your Citations in Order

Failure to acknowledge is not as big a sin as outright plagiarism, but there is something disconcerting about it. Two related problems necessarily task academics. One confronts those who enter a new field: how to make sure to build on already existing developments and avoid unnecessary wheel reinvention. The answer—as all research students are told—is to do the desk research first. (Read more from Times Higher Education.)

Facing an Impossible Choice

Maybe the problem with academics is that we take too much pride in our jobs. No doubt that sounds counterintuitive: How can pride in our work be a bad thing? It can when it inspires far too many PhDs to labor willingly for far too long in contingent positions. (Read more from Vitae.)