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.

Save Our Public Universities

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 lecture “The American Scholar” implicitly raised radical questions about the nature of education, culture, and consciousness, and about their interactions. He urged his hearers to make the New World as new as it ought to be, to outlive the constraints that colonial experience imposed on them, and to create the culture that would arise from the full and honest use of their own intellects, minds, and senses. (Read more from Harper’s.)

Rauschenberg Foundation Eases Copyright Restrictions on Art

Museum goers tend to be unaware of the vast network of copyright protections that underlie images of much of modern and contemporary art, until they try to shoot a cellphone picture of a favorite painting and receive an embarrassing tut-tut from a guard. But for decades, historians, curators, and museum officials have been highly aware of these protections. And many have chafed under a system whose fees and elaborate permission agreements can make publishing scholarly books or publicizing exhibitions prohibitively expensive or an administrative nightmare. (Read more from the New York Times.)

How Many Artists Can’t Create?

The starving artist: one who sacrifices a comfortable lifestyle to invest limited resources toward his or her art. This could be anyone: visual artists, literary artists, musicians, actors. But how many artists or potential artists are out there who simply don’t create because life, with its stresses and burdens, has deprived them of the ability? (Read more from the Michigan Daily.)

Met Museum Settles Lawsuit, Will Revise Admission Signs

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will soon get new signs that spell out, in boldfaced type, the voluntary nature of the museum’s pay-what-you-wish admission policy. The changes—which include replacing the word “recommended” with “suggested”—result from an agreement to settle a lawsuit that accused the Met of trying to mislead visitors into paying an entrance fee when none is required. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)

Collaborate: An Imperative for Graduate Students

Graduate students need to seek out opportunities for collaboration at every stage of their graduate career. Experience working as part of a team is valuable for PhD students preparing for a rapidly evolving academic job market, and it is indispensable for those pursuing careers beyond academe. Want proof? Survey the requirements section of ads for positions you could see yourself taking. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Importance of Being an Artist’s Assistant

The tradition of artists assisting other artists is as old as the profession itself. The New York gallery Luxembourg and Dayan has also made it the subject of an exhibition, In the Making. Three of the artists included in the show spoke to the Art Newspaper about their experience assisting Andy Warhol, Jack Goldstein, and Robert Rauschenberg, and how it shaped their own work. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Ageism and Creativity

Psychologists generally consider creativity to be the domain of the young. In this they have followed the lead of Harvey Lehman, who in 1953 conceded that “the old usually possess greater wisdom and erudition” but claimed that “when a situation requires a new way of looking at things … the old seem stereotyped and rigid.” Lehman and his successors are guilty of ageism: in this case, a mistaken belief that creativity is inversely related to age. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Who Owns Culture?

The quiet corridors of great public museums have witnessed revolutionary breakthroughs in the understanding of the past, such as when scholars at the British Museum cracked the Rosetta Stone, deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, and no longer had to rely on classical writers to find out about ancient Egyptian civilization. But museums’ quest for knowledge is today under strain, amid angry debates over who owns culture. (Read more from OUP Blog.)