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.

The Resurgence of Women-Only Art Shows

While some artists are ambivalent about being viewed through the lens of gender, the all-women’s group exhibition, which fell out of favor in the 1980s and 1990s, is flourishing again. At least a dozen galleries and museums across the United States are featuring women-themed surveys, a surge curators and dealers say is shining a light on neglected artists, resuscitating some careers, and raising the commercial potential of others. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Help Desk: Why Your Show Wasn’t Reviewed

None of my shows has ever been reviewed, even though I’ve exhibited my work in solo and group shows for almost six years. Press releases, personal emails, and newsletters have been sent from me and from the galleries. The galleries aren’t blue-chip, but they’re decent, and there’s an audience. Why can’t I get a review? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

How Critical Thinking Sabotages Painting

Critical thinking benefits disciplines based in words, and I use it myself when teaching modern art history and humanities seminars. But it’s a disaster when used to teach painting, whether to college art majors who want to become painters, to students who want to go into neighboring fields like graphic design or photography, or to biology students who decide to give painting a try. (Read more from Two Coats of Paint.)

We Need Ethnographic Museums Today—Whatever You Think of Their History

Since the 1970s ethnographic museums, perceived as warehouses of colonial loot, were charged with divesting non-Western works of the significance they once carried, in the heat and dust of ceremony, in the movement of dance or oratory, on the bodies of their former owners, in the flow of life. Among commentators and curators, there was much argument regarding approaches to display. (Read more from Apollo.)

Grade Inflation, Higher and Higher

The first major update in seven years of a database on grade inflation has found that grades continue to rise and that A is the most common grade earned at all kinds of colleges. Since the last significant release of the survey, faculty members at Princeton University and Wellesley College, among other institutions, have debated ways to limit grade inflation, despite criticism from some students who welcome the high averages. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Revising the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Dissertation

Like many graduate students, I wrote a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad dissertation, so revising it into a book has been something of a challenge. I’ve worked through it in two different ways. First, I’ve changed my writing and editing habits for what feels like the hundredth time. Second, I’ve adopted a strategy of recasting my chapters as journal articles. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Publications

Some survey findings make good sense and deserve attention on their own merits. Perhaps the most significant of these—which is a theme explored across the report—is that discovery patterns and practices vary across different sectors such as academic, corporate, and medical; different countries and levels of national income; and different fields and disciplines. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

Getting Down to Brass Taxes: An Interview with Tax Expert Rus Garofolo

Tax day is fast approaching—what’s a freelance artist or burgeoning arts organization to do? In anticipation of the IRS’s upcoming deadline, Amanda Keating sat down with Rus Garofolo, founder of Brass Taxes, to discuss some key questions that arts organizations might want to consider in their tax prep. (Read more from Fractured Atlas.)