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.

Professor Pay Up 3.4 Percent

Salaries for full-time continuing faculty increased by 3.4 percent this year and 2.7 percent adjusted for inflation, according to a new American Association of University Professors report. But while a continued upward salary trend is promising, the report argues that it doesn’t reflect a systemic threat to higher education: the decline of full-time and ranked faculty positions. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Why Failure Is Being Taught in Art Schools

Of course art schools want to propel students toward success, but should they also teach young artists how to fail? The answer is found sprinkled throughout the curriculum of Chicago’s top art schools, where students are routinely encouraged to consider what it means to fail, but also how to “fail better,” in the immortal words of playwright Samuel Beckett. (Read more from Chicago Magazine.)

What Is Object-Oriented Ontology?

Ask yourself: what does your toaster want? How about your dog? Or the bacteria in your gut? What about the pixels on the screen you’re reading now—how is their day going? In other words, do things, animals, and other nonhuman entities experience their existence in a way that lies outside our own species-centric definition of consciousness? It’s precisely these questions that the nascent philosophical movement known as Object-Oriented Ontology is attempting to answer. (Read more from Artspace Magazine.)

So Long at the Fair?

Love ’em or hate ’em, the art fair is the major marketing phenomenon of our times. The website Artsy lists sixty top fairs worldwide, with estimates for maintaining a booth at one ranging from $15,000 to more than $100,000 a week. Dealers complain of sixteen-hour days, collectors who “buy with their ears,” exhausting travel, and a back-breaking workload for gallery staff. (Read more from Vasari24.)

Seven Bricks to Lay the Foundation for Productive Difficult Dialogues

There are three basic ways that I hear faculty talk about difficult dialogues: in-class dialogues that were planned but did not go particularly well; in-class hot moments that were not anticipated and that the professor did not feel equipped to handle; and difficult dialogues that happen during office hours or outside class. In all three instances, faculty are challenged to use skills they may not have learned at any point in their disciplinary training. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

A Multiplicity of University Publishing

If you already have a university press in place, why add library publishing to the mix? And why stop there? Why not allow the special affordances of digital media, such as low costs and dissemination at the speed of light, to enable publishing centers across any institution with the pluck to take on the effort? (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

Expanded Horizons: Looking beyond Building Projects

In the 1990s, museum expansions focused on spaces for larger and more dramatically displayed temporary exhibitions and, in the contemporary field, for the installation of larger works of art, in line with artistic practice. Then the focus was on circulation and event space and on revenue-generating activities, segueing into new spaces for educational activities. Today there is an interesting trend toward spaces for performance and music programming. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Interviewing as Performance Art

Think about the last job talk or speaker seminar you attended. How did the speaker make you feel? Did he or she put you at ease with a fluid delivery and natural speaking style? Or did the speaker seem out of place and appear nervous or uncomfortable in the presence of an audience? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)