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.

Top Twenty Most Vibrant Arts Communities in America

Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research has announced its third annual Arts Vibrancy Index, which ranks more than nine hundred communities across the country, examining the level of supply, demand, and government support for the arts in each city. (Read more from the National Center for Arts Research.)

What Other States Can Learn from Rhode Island’s Arts Incentives

While Rhode Island may be the smallest state in the country, it has become a powerhouse for attracting artists and art lovers to its shores. And the method by which state leaders have leveraged Rhode Island’s tax code to benefit the creative community could serve as a model for other states looking to cultivate a stronger arts economy. (Read more from Charleston City Paper.)

US Students Are Struggling in the Arts. Donald Trump’s Budget Would Make the Problem Worse

American teenagers are not excelling in the arts, and President Trump’s proposed budget cuts will likely make matters worse, experts say. The most recent results of a wide-ranging national educational assessment known as the Nation’s Report Card left significant room for improvement in the visual arts and music, the National Center for Education Statistics reported last week. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Want Happier Professors? Try Being Nice

When it comes to keeping tenured professors content in their jobs, you can catch more flies with honey than you can with big faculty-focused strategic initiatives. A new study has found that their organizational commitment hinged far more on whether they believed they worked in a caring, supportive environment than on their sense that administrators had undertaken broad efforts to support the faculty. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Frieze New York Gets Reframed for the Post-Truth Era

Reflecting director Victoria Siddall’s aim that Frieze, true to its editorial roots, should be “a place where art is made, discussed, and debated,” there will be protest in the air when the fair unfurls its serpentine white tent for its sixth edition in New York. Some galleries are using Frieze as a platform to respond to current events. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Wait—What Was That? History’s Bygone Art Movements

“Fame,” according to art critic Henry McBride, “is a most uncertain garment.” The same is true of art movements and labels. Some—Abstract Expressionism, for instance—are familiar to the average museumgoer. However, others that were at one time in the vanguard have slipped into the shadows and are now the province of art historians and other specialists. (Read more from ARTnews.)

Was Robert Rauschenberg the Con Man of Art? 

There’s a volubility about Rauschenberg’s visual imagination that is irreconcilable with the discipline art demands. However monumental or panoramic a work of art may be, there must always be some acknowledgment of the limits of the artist’s vision. There was something of the outrageousness of a Ponzi scheme in the way Rauschenberg took this or that avant-garde idea and inflated it—over and over again. (Read more from the New York Review of Books.)

How Big Is the Online Art Market?

Despite a relative slowdown in the global art market, the online art market grew by 15 percent, to $3.75 billion, last year, according to Robert Read, head of art and private clients for Hiscox. The online art market’s share of the total art market also grew last year, from 7.4 percent in 2015 to 8.4 percent. While that may seem small, it is roughly equivalent to ecommerce sales’ share of the total retail market, which reached 8.3 percent last year, according to the US census. (Read more from Artnet News.)