CAA News Today

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Trump and the Arts: Evita, Huge Towers, and a Snub for Warhol

For the arts world, the question is essentially the same as the one being asked everywhere right now, across the political spectrum: “What will a President Donald J. Trump mean for me?” The answer from artists, museums, theaters, actors, writers, musicians, and the movie and television industry is: “Your guess is as good as mine.” (Read more from the New York Times.)

How to Fix the Art World, Part 1

Last August ARTnews embarked on an epic project: finding out what inhabitants of the art world think is wrong with their world and how they would fix it. In the ensuing months ARTnews spoke with more than fifty individuals—artists and curators, critics and historians, art dealers and an art-fair director—to gather a range of perspectives. (Read more from ARTnews.)

An Era for Women Artists?

Nearly half a century has passed since Linda Nochlin posed her question “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Now we face it again, as a new wave of all-women exhibitions revives the question and suggests a new answer. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

The Ballet of White Victimhood: On Jordan Wolfson, Petroushka, and Donald Trump

The white body, through its repetition in a history of art that is largely painted white itself, has become an easy and lazy signifier for a universal body, for a metaphorical body, one that becomes symbolic and slippery, that can always be more than its mere representation. The nonwhite body has greater difficulty in attaining this metaphorical bounty. (Read more from Artspace Magazine.)

“Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”: Artists Space Steps out of Analysis and into Action

Amid all the election paraphernalia of the past few months, some bold stickers have been appearing across New York City. With white text on a red background, they demand: “Decolonize This Place.” At Artists Space Books and Talks, the home base of Decolonize This Place through December 17, the “source” is more complicated than any one person, location, or idea. (Read more from ARTnews.)

Thinking outside the Pipeline

Many faculty diversity initiatives are predicated on the pipeline theory: that getting more minority students to enroll in PhD programs eventually will lead to gains in numbers of professors from underrepresented backgrounds. The pipeline theory has long had its critics, who point to other problems within the academic recruitment, hiring, and retention system. A new study seeks to back up such criticisms with hard data. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Impostor Syndrome Is Definitely a Thing

Impostor syndrome is the feeling that you don’t belong—in graduate school or in your first academic or alt-ac job—and it’s more common that you might think. It makes people believe that they aren’t good enough, smart enough, or deserving enough. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Ugly Consequences of Complaining about “Students These Days”

Sometimes we do need to vent. It isn’t easy teaching students who don’t come to class prepared, seem to always want the easiest way, are prepared to cheat if necessary, don’t have good study skills, and aren’t interested in learning what we love to teach. At some point, though, venting morphs into complaining, and what we say about students becomes what we think about them. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)