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.

Dear Art School Grads, Do What You Love—but Never for Free

Even if your dream job is to do something creative full-time, you’ll have to get used to the business side of whatever you do. That means shaking habits you might’ve learned in college to produce great work, or ditching assumptions that led you to take that unpaid internship. Above all else, it means always charging what you’re worth—starting now, no exceptions. (Read more from Fast Company.)

Should Artists Have to Talk about Their Work?

An artist’s ability to give a Big Talk has been part of the job for years. There are many ways an artist can shape this talk—this overview of his or her work—or willfully avoid shaping it. But when did we decide that artists have to be able to talk about their work in order to justify the work’s value, or its existence? (Read more from Glasstire.)

Jerry Saltz’s Life as a Failed Artist

It pains me to say it, but I am a failed artist. “Pains me” because nothing in my life has given me the boundless psychic bliss of making art for tens of hours at a stretch for a decade in my twenties and thirties, doing it every day and always thinking about it, looking for a voice to fit my own time, imagining scenarios of success and failure. (Read more from Vulture.)

World’s First Graphene Paint Launches in the UK

The miracle material graphene—considered the strongest substance known to science—has been used to make ecofriendly paint by the manufacturer Graphenstone. The paint is made from a pure lime base that has been combined with graphene—a recently engineered material hailed as the thinnest, strongest, and most conductive ever developed. (Read more from De Zeen.)

Is LA’s Art Scene Growing Too Quickly?

For years, Los Angeles seemed perpetually about to come into its own, always a soon-to-arrive international art city. Now that international attention and infrastructural shifts suggest it has arrived, the question becomes how to save some of the freedom that LA’s always-emerging state previously allowed it. (Read more from Apollo.)

Structures of Power and the Ethical Limits of Speech

Broad constitutional protections mean that, when it comes to artistic expression, direct government censorship is limited and declining. In contrast, private constraints on expression are on the rise: they range from the limits set by social-media platforms and self-censorship resulting from market demands to programmatic decisions made in response to political pressure from ad hoc groups. (Read more from Truthdig.)

Theory from the Ruins

The polemical theories of the Frankfurt School remain indispensable in the present age, when the dilemmas and malaises once specific to Western societies have expanded to encompass the whole globe. As a new era of irrationalism dawns on humankind, with corruption and mendacity becoming an openly avowed modus operandi for all shades of government, the Frankfurt analysis urges itself upon us once more. (Read more from Aeon.)

Tread Carefully with the Socratic Method

Many of us use some version of the Socratic method in our classrooms to stimulate critical thinking. What if a student takes offense to something we said—perhaps while we were playing devil’s advocate—and accuses us of some form of discrimination? On today’s hypersensitized campuses, that has become a very real possibility. (Read more from Vitae.)

Why Are Americans So Hostile to State-Funded Art?

Before the establishment of the NEA, arts and culture support remained the project of urban elites, business communities, and institutional philanthropy. When the government eventually intervened, it supported artists through passive systems like tax exemptions for cultural organizations and for donations by wealthy patrons. (Read more from the New Republic.)