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.

A Prized Stettheimer Painting, Sold under the Radar by a University

When Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville, tried to sell two paintings several years ago from its storied Alfred Stieglitz art collection, a firestorm erupted. A drawn-out legal challenge ended in a compromise that allowed the school to share its collection with Crystal Bridges. What was not revealed at the time—and has only recently come to light—is that before the agreement was completed, the university’s president quietly sold two other paintings owned by Fisk. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Artiquette: Ten Mistakes Not to Make While Promoting Your Art

How do you make it in the art world? It’s a magical formula that involves, talent, drive, grit, and the ability to promote oneself. Unfortunately, talking up your own artwork, projects, and ideas can be a delicate balancing act. To help you walk that line, Artnet News has rounded up a list of mistakes to avoid in self-promotion. (Read more from Artnet News.)

Sharon Louden: Consultants, Careers, and Community

I frequently get pitches from art consultants who offer help securing exhibitions, grants, and publicity. I often wonder if their services are helpful, or whether the consultants are taking advantage of vulnerable underrecognized artists, so I contacted my friend and colleague Sharon Louden, a successful artist who gives professional-development webinars and lectures about sustaining a creative life. (Read more from Two Coats of Paint.)

Talking Art and Tech in Bay Area Living Rooms

The all-purpose status of the living room made it the ideal site for a series of events initiated two years ago by the artists Liat Berdugo and Elia Vargas. The duo used the living rooms of Bay Area artists and cultural producers to host monthly public conversations—on new media, digital art, creative works in progress, and artistic practices—that were attended by friends and strangers. (Read more from Rhizome.)

The Syllabus as a Contract

Whatever the professor’s intention, when students see a due date on the syllabus, they often assume that the assignment is due via online submission by midnight on that date. Technology has forced professors to be extremely specific on these details or else face inevitable challenges from students. It’s precisely when such challenges arise that professors and students look to the syllabus as a contract. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Are Acrylics as Durable as Oils?

If oil paint had to sell itself to the marketplace as a new medium, it would have a difficult time—especially because its list of problems would include yellowing, cracking, wrinkling, flaking, embrittlement, hydrolysis, fatty-acid crystallization, and protuberances and delamination caused by metallic soaps. This is not to say acrylics do not have their own challenges as well! (Read more from Just Paint.)

Why Books Are the Perfect Way to Spread Art to the Masses

Art is expensive, often ludicrously so. For many art lovers, books are the most viable means of supporting artists and beginning an art collection of their own. Carolyn Schoerner is the mind behind Books For All Press, a nonprofit publisher working with artists living with mental illness and developmental disabilities. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

For Scholarly Communications, Double-Dipping Is Double the Fun

Since commerce is inherently evil—and commerce connected to the academy even more so—it must be an exceedingly dastardly deed for a publisher to engage in double-dipping, in which the same content finds one audience in institutions and another among the authors who create it, sometimes in violation of an author’s contract. So how does double-dipping work? (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)