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.

Who Can Afford to Be a Starving Artist?

Take a minute and picture a world in which every adult on the planet is a full-time, professional artist. Arts funding and education are abundant, and folks spend their days in the studios, galleries, stages, pages, screens, and streets creating in collaborative groups or in Zenlike isolation. Would that be a good world to live in? (Read more from Createquity.)

Medieval Scots Used Art the Way We Use Social Media

Medieval Scots once gave each other postcard-sized artworks to forge social bonds, in the same way we post pictures on social media today, according to new research. The “postcards on parchment”—whose painted images included patron saints, the Virgin Mary and child, and highly decorated lettering—revealed status, allegiances, and values among the wealthy classes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (Read more from the Scotsman.)

Learn from My Mistakes as a Dean

If you’re reading this, you most likely are either a new dean or you aspire to the job. Perhaps you are about to start your first deanship this summer. Whether you become a dean at your current institution or at a new one, here are a few things to keep in mind—advice entirely based on what I did wrong in my first few years as a dean. (Read more from Vitae.)

Wrap Up Your Dissertation with a Writing Plan

Anyone pursuing a graduate degree has experienced the feeling that a project will go on forever. Writing a dissertation can be, and quite often is, the biggest academic undertaking that many of us have experienced. Grant applications, manuscripts, and literature reviews pale in comparison to the size of the average dissertation, and writing one can be an incredibly intimidating goal. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

How Do I Get My Foot in the Art World?

I’m a recent grad and want to learn more about the art world, so hopefully, one day, I can work in the arts. I didn’t major in art, but I took several art history and art classes and really loved them. I also love going to galleries and museums. Could you give me some suggestions on how to learn more? (Read more from Burnaway.)

Making “Skins” with Fluid Acrylics

An acrylic “skin” is a dry acrylic film that can be made of paint, medium, or a combination of paint and medium, that is not attached to any substrate. While acrylic skins can be made with just about any acrylic medium, gel, paste, or paint, fluid acrylics work particularly well since the consistency allows for easy pouring and spreading onto a casting surface. (Read more from Just Paint.)

Using Computers to Better Understand Art

A new field of research aims to deepen, and even quantify, our understanding of the aesthetic experience. Visual stylometry uses computational and statistical methods to calculate and compare underlying image features in ways humans never could before. Instead of relying only on what our senses perceive, we can use mathematical techniques to discover novel insights into artists and artworks. (Read more from the Conversation.)

Getty Research Portal Grows with a New Design and More Than 100,000 Digitized Volumes

Marking the occasion of its four-year anniversary, the Getty Research Portal has been rebuilt and redesigned, making it easier to explore the digitized literature of art history. The portal is a catalogue providing free access to books and journals made available online by contributing institutions. (Read more from the Getty Iris.)