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.

Cultural Appropriation: A Roundtable 

In a roundtable, the artists Salome Asega, Ajay Kurian, and Jacolby Satterwhite; scholars Homi K. Bhabha and Joan Kee; Artforum editor Michelle Kuo; and writer, artist, and activist Gregg Bordowitz examine the urgent and omnipresent politics of representation, appropriation, and power. (Read more from Artforum.)

Andrea Fraser Tracks Down Museum Trustees’ Political Donations

The artist Andrea Fraser is mapping the connections between major American museums and the political elite to expose institutions’ ties to the White House. Using publicly available information, she is documenting all political donations made in 2016 by museum patrons and trustees, many of whom contributed to Donald Trump’s election campaign. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Anti-Intellectualism and the “Dumbing Down” of America

There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It’s the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. (Read more from Signs of the Times.)

If Google Teaches an AI to Draw, Will That Help It Think?

The point of SketchRNN is not only to learn how to draw pictures, but to “generalize abstract concepts in a manner similar to humans.” They don’t want to create a machine that can sketch pigs. They want to create a machine that can recognize and output “pigness.” (Read more from the Atlantic.)

The Unseen Labor of Mentoring

It’s extremely flattering that students recommend me to peers who need extra support. However, it can also be frustrating to continuously manage unscheduled drop-ins when I’m trying to grade papers, prep for class, respond to emails, write letters of recommendations, and prepare for meetings. (Read more from Vitae.)

Law and Order 

Plagiarism, cheating, tampering, and submitting false records all threaten the integrity of your class and diminish other students’ honest work and effort. Given that misconduct is both disturbingly pervasive and potentially ruinous, how should teaching assistants proceed if they are concerned a student may be running afoul of the rules? (Read more from GradHacker.)

Drinking and Conferencing

At the International Congress on Medieval Studies, as at most academic gatherings, socializing typically unfolds in the presence of alcohol: at the daily wine hour, at large dinners with plentiful cocktails, at champagne celebrations of prizes awarded or careers coming to a close, at casual meetings with friends anytime between sessions when we can gather for a drink. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

How Are Funders Boosting Engagement across Diverse Communities?

We occasionally stumble across a news item that compels us to step back and take stock of the larger arts philanthropy landscape. Such is the case with news from New York City, where an impressive cadre of funders joined forces earlier this spring to engage diverse audiences. (Read more from Inside Philanthropy.)