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.

Online Platforms Are Not Enough. Artists Need Affordable Space

In 2008, a bunch of friends and I built out and managed a studio space in Brooklyn. We signed a five-year lease, with a three-year option, and hoped for the best. We wanted to make our work and to innovate. This meant taking risks and failing often, and we needed low overhead to make this possible. (Read more from Creativz.)

The Best Intentions: Inside the Wild World of Charity Auctions

Benefit auctions have become about as ubiquitous as art fairs and openings. Charity sales are the primary means by which artists can pack a philanthropic punch, but they can also burden those who donate work with drawbacks and tax disadvantages. People have been questioning the model for years, but these conversations tend to stall in the absence of alternatives. (Read more from ARTnews.)

Against the Crowdfunding Economy

Which people get to live their dreams and which do not? In the art world, as elsewhere, success is often tightly correlated with pedigree and acceptance into elite institutions. And amid the increasing consumption of digital media, the conditions for success have become ever more fraught. (Read more from Jacobin.)

Public Art Piece Uses Augmented Reality to Explore Our Relationship to Technology

Public art has the power to shift not only our perspectives on specific sites, but also our relationship to space and location more generally. The artist Ivan Toth Depeña has created a multilayered public work of art, called Lapse, that considers these themes along with the ways we use technology. (Read more from PSFK.)

Copyright Q&A

The Copyright Alliance asked creators to submit questions about the copyright registration process. Rob Kasunic, director of registration policy and practices at the US Copyright Office, answered a few of them to provide clarity about the process. (Read more from the Copyright Alliance.)

How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?

Display at Your Own Risk is a primarily web-based exhibition that examines the current status of digital cultural heritage and public accessibility to it through the online collections of some of the world’s most physically frequented museums. Spearheaded by Andrea Wallace, Display approaches the task from an internet user’s perspective to see if an institution provides the everyday person with enough information to avoid violating its image rights. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects, If They Have Some Specific Skills, Too

The knock that liberal-arts graduates have a tough time landing a first job is confirmed by data. Yet a new analysis of help-wanted postings for entry-level jobs suggests that those graduates can improve their prospects by acquiring a small level of proficiency in one of eight specific skill sets, such as social media or data analysis. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Advice for the Newly Tenured

I would love to share with you the three biggest mistakes that I observe newly tenured faculty members make. If you know what those mistakes are, then you are not only far less likely to make them, but you also have the opportunity to experiment with new ways of thinking and working that will help you to truly enjoy your tenured status. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)