CAA News Today

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

Academic Libraries and the Textbook Taboo: Time to Get Over It?

Librarians have allowed an unfortunate limitation of the print world to shape not only their behaviors but also their philosophy, to the point that many of us perceive excluding textbooks as a defining value of librarianship—not a service we regretfully forego because it’s not feasible, but a service we forego because “That’s not who we are as librarians.” (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

Textbooks in Academic Libraries: The Publisher’s Case

There is no precise and inarguable definition of a college textbook. Even the lines that define “college” are blurry: Do we mean elite, private schools like Harvard and Stanford; four-year state institutions; community colleges; the for-profit world; or MOOCs? The “college textbook,” in other words, is a slippery concept, and it is important to know exactly what someone means when uttering it. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

When College Students Need Food Pantries More Than Textbooks

As a more racially and socioeconomically diverse body of students pursues college in the United States, schools find themselves responding to more requests to stock food pantries and hand out vouchers for supplies at campus bookstores. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

How the Art World Responded to AIDS

How artists grappled—and continue to grapple—with the epidemic is the focus of Art AIDS America, an exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In some 120 works by close to one hundred artists, the show captures the rage, anguish, and overwhelming sense of loss that accompanied the epidemic at its height, along with the activism it sparked and its continuing reverberation through the culture. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)

The State: A Friend Indeed to Artists in Need?

Createquity imagines that a healthy arts ecosystem is one in which opportunities to make one’s living as an artist are distributed equitably across socioeconomic levels. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many Western countries, where research indicates that people of lesser means are not as equipped to take on the risk involved in pursuing a career in the arts. (Read more from Createquity.)

Wonders and Blunders: What Makes a Great Museum?

What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question may have exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque government to recoup the construction costs within three years, moved the debate on to issues of branding and statement architecture. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Five Time-Saving Strategies for the Flipped Classroom

I often hear comments like “The flipped classroom takes too much time,” “I don’t have time to devise so many new teaching strategies,” “It takes too much time to record and edit videos,” or “I don’t have time to cover everything on the syllabus.” I also hear “I tried to flip my class, but it was exhausting; so I quit.” If these comments sound familiar, it might be helpful to create margins in your flipped classroom. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

Real Estate for the 1 Percent, with Art for the Masses

Richard Serra, a stickler about the differences between art and architecture, once described most public sculpture in urban architectural settings as “displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, ‘We represent modern art.’” In twentieth-century New York, residential and commercial developments tended to marry architecture and art with that kind of ambivalence, if they married them at all: lobbies with a few pretty, unremarkable paintings; courtyards with pleasant design pieces; or plop art by sculptors whose work rarely showed up in the museums around town. (Read more from the New York Times.)