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.

Fair Use Prevails as Supreme Court Rejects Google Books Copyright Case

The US Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from the Authors Guild and other writers claiming Google’s scanning of their books amounts to wanton copyright infringement and not fair use. The guild urged the high court to review a lower court decision in favor of Google that the writers said amounted to an “unprecedented judicial expansion of the fair-use doctrine.” (Read more from Ars Technica.)

Federal Ruling Puts California Artist Royalty Law in Jeopardy

A federal judge recently dismissed a lawsuit against several auction houses sued by artists over failure to pay them royalties as guaranteed by California law. The ruling could spell the end for the California Resale Royalty Act, which allowed some artists to collect 5 percent of any resale of their work if they lived in state or if the work was sold here. (Read more from the Los Angeles Business Journal.)

Loaded Symbols and Artistic Responsibility

An inexcusable cultural blind spot in the South is a glaring lack of education regarding imagery and symbols—their meaning, power, and unmitigated capacity to make people feel threatened. These minatory icons—nooses, Confederate flags, swastikas, blood drop crosses—are not symbols that can be recontextualized or reappropriated in art. They aren’t even “loaded images.” They are emblems of hate. (Read more from Burnaway.)

Does Mapplethorpe Still Matter?

The Perfect Medium, two concurrent retrospectives of the work of Robert Mapplethorpe hosted simultaneously at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Getty Center, provides the richest narrative about the photographer to date. By centering on Mapplethorpe’s world—his network of affiliations—instead of resting on the artist’s brand of sexual bombast, the shows manage to lift Mapplethorpe out of the often facile discourse on pornography’s contentions with fine art. (Read more from Aperture.)

Estimating Square Foot Coverage for Products

When it is important to know how much paint will be needed to complete a painting, as in the case of a mural or large painting, or simply priming a large surface, there are a few ways to estimate how much your tube, bottle, or jar of paint will cover or how much you will need to buy to complete the project. (Read more from Just Paint.)

Integrate to Innovate: Using Standards to Push Content Forward

At least once a month my colleagues and I walk out of a meeting and someone says: “Remember when we used to be publishers?” It’s become the obvious joke when all we talk about is metadata, digital content distribution, ecommerce solutions, or content licensing issues. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

The Slow Professor

While professors may be accustomed to nonacademics clinging to an outdated image of faculty life, the newest resistance to letting it go comes from within the academy. In a new book, two tenured professors propose applying the “slow movement”—which describes everything from food to parenting to science to sex—to academic work. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

How Can the Disparity in Arts Funding along Racial Lines Be Fixed?

Nationally, only 6 percent of minority organizations receive comparable funding from individual donors to organizations serving mostly white patrons, according to Grantmakers in the Arts. At a time when foundations like Wallace are spending big bucks to maximize audience engagement, what root causes account for this discrepancy? (Read more from Inside Philanthropy.)