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.

How to Become a Curator

Start out as an artist instead. In school, you’re always saddled with organizing the group shows, buying the beer, placating fellow artists’ fears, making the invitations, composing the checklist, finding the funding, contacting the press, inviting the audience. Your entire art practice becomes a smudgy line between curating and art, and you grow to feel strange and unnecessary. (Read more from Momus.)

Journalism and Art: Complementary and Collaborative Storytelling

The Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism project is one example of how journalists are employing the arts to get important issues off the page and screen and into people’s lives. At the same time, artists are using reporting techniques, interviews, public records, documentary footage, and photo captions to create work addressing social, economic, and political topics that usually fall within the purview of journalism. (Read more from Nieman Storyboard.)

Google Launches Tilt Brush App for Virtual-Reality Sketching

Google’s virtual-reality painting app, Tilt Brush, could allow architects and designers to walk through their sketches in three dimensions as they draw them. Available on the HTC Vive headset device, Tilt Brush allows users to create 3D imagery using a simple controller that mimics the gestures of painting. (Read more from De Zeen.)

Diversity in Academe: Who Sets a College’s Diversity Agenda?

True diversity remains a struggle for many colleges. A special report from the Chronicle of Higher Education looks at who actually sets a college’s diversity agenda, and what makes that agenda flourish or flop. These questions have taken on a special urgency as race-related protests have erupted on many campuses and as the nation’s population grows more diverse. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

How Cities Can Revitalize Their Public Spaces

A city is much more than a collection of tall buildings on the skyline. What makes a city a great place to live and visit, says James Corner, are the shared spaces—sidewalks, plazas, parks, waterfronts. Corner is part of a new wave of muscular landscape architects who argue that their work is about more than planting trees and grass: it is about reshaping the identity of a place and how the people who live there see themselves. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)

We’re All Failures

Academics are wired to achieve, and their CVs are designed to showcase their every accomplishment. While rejection is a fact of academic life, most faculty don’t share the gory details. Every successful scholar has tanked job interviews; been turned down for fellowships, postdocs, and grants; and had publications that flopped. So it’s been inspiring to see scholars go public with “CVs of Failure” that list their numerous brushes with defeat in glorious detail. (Read more from Vitae.)

The Job-Search Buddy System

The academic enterprise values individual contributions, even though scholarly achievements require a communal effort. While metrics that weigh heavily on the number of papers, books, seminars, and discoveries that individuals produce are an essential part of scholarly training, the environment this creates may condition scholars to pursue all of their career goals without assistance from others. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Why Is Scholarly-Communication Reform So Hard to Talk About, and Where Are the Authors?

Readers of any number of professional listservs, magazines, and journals may have noticed that questions about scholarly-communication reform tend to be vexed and controversial. Having participated in these conversations for over twenty years, and having recently gotten home from a conference that dealt specifically with such questions, I’ve been thinking about why feelings run so high when we talk about them. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)