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.

Art under Threat in 2016: Presenting the Figures

Freemuse registered 1,028 attacks on artists and violations of their rights in 2016 across 78 countries, continuing a worrying trend of artistic freedom increasingly coming under threat. The number of cases registered in 2016 more than doubled the amount in 2015, increasing by 119 percent, rising from 469 attacks. (Read more from Freemuse.)

What You Need to Know about Hate Speech and Free Speech

Is there any way to curb speech if it discriminates against people’s identity, like race? And when does speech become punishable under the law? Here’s what you need to know about the freedom of speech and dealing with hate speech in the current political climate. (Read more from Teen Vogue.)

We Don’t Pay Visual Artists Properly—That Needs to Change

Jane is a typical artist trying to build and maintain her career. She has had reasonable success with her art thus far but needs to subsidize her income by taking on work as a graphic designer. Now she has decided to return to art school to get university qualifications and commit fully to her professional artistic practice. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Reports of the Death of Religious Art Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

When written in the same sentence, the terms “religion” and “art” tend to turn the contemporary secularized gaze back in time to Renaissance imagery. Those old, redolent, often pious pictures of Christ Child and Madonna are pleasing to look at, but these days their principal function is to confirm how religious art existed in ages past. Present-day artists can’t possibly be interested in that anymore. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)

The Prestige Gap

Women earn 60 percent of baccalaureate degrees and 46 percent of doctoral degrees, excluding professional programs, according to 2015 data from the National Science Foundation, yet they’re still underrepresented in many disciplines. Why? A new study points to segregation by gender based on field of study and what it calls program prestige. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Importance of Female Friendship in Graduate School

Sometime in high school, when I was sixteen, living in the suburbs, and hopelessly devoted with the latest music, I was asked whether I prefer male or female singers. As I was answering—something about how men sang more interesting songs—it dawned on me: How many female-led bands had I heard? When was the last time a radio station played a song from an all-female band? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Metropolitan Museum Puts 375,000 Public-Domain Images in Creative Commons

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has placed 375,000 images of public-domain works in the Creative Commons. This major move by one of the world’s most important museums means that users can now access pictures of many of the Met’s holdings on Wikimedia, and that these images are now subject to free use, with no copyright restrictions. (Read more from ARTnews.)

The Value of Copyright: A Publisher’s Perspective

There is no one view of copyright that fits all publishers. The publisher of a poetry magazine will likely feel differently about aspects of copyright when compared to, say, the publisher of your local phone book. Indeed, even within scholarly publishing there is a range of attitudes toward copyright. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)