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.

NHA Annual Meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day

The National Humanities Alliance will hold its 2013 annual meeting on Monday, March 18, and Humanities Advocacy Day on Tuesday, March 19, both in Washington, DC. Premeeting sessions are tentatively scheduled to begin on Sunday afternoon, March 17. Events will take place on the George Washington University campus and Capitol Hill. (Read more from the National Humanities Alliance.)

Average Pay Increases for Professors on Tenure-Track Matched Inflation This Year

The median base salary for tenured and tenure-track faculty members increased this academic year by an average of 2.1 percent, matching the rate of inflation. That year-to-year increase was slightly higher than the growth last year, when the average increase was 1.9 percent, according to an annual report released by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

LACMA Moves to Take Over MOCA

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has made a formal proposal to acquire the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which has been struggling with financial troubles and staff and board defections. LACMA Director Michael Govan and the two cochairs of his board made the offer in a February 24 letter to the MOCA board cochairs, laying out the rationale for an acquisition. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)

Art Emerges from DNA Left Behind

They are the faces of real people, portraitlike sculptures etched from an almost powdery substance. The eye colors are distinct, the facial contours sharp, even though the artist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, has never met or seen her subjects. Instead of using photographs or an art model for her work, she scoops detritus from New York City’s streets—cigarette butts, hair follicles, gum wrappers—and analyzes the genetic material people leave behind. Dewey-Hagborg, a PhD student in electronic arts, makes the faces after studying clues found in DNA. (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)

Can We Please Stop Drawing Trees on Top of Skyscrapers?

Just a couple of years ago, if you wanted to make something look trendier, you put a bird on it. Birds were everywhere. I’m not sure if Twitter was what started all the flutter, but it got so bad that Portlandia performed a skit named, you guessed it, “Put a Bird on It.” It turns out architects have been doing the same thing, just with trees. Want to make a skyscraper look trendy and sustainable? Put a tree on it. Or better yet, dozens. (Read more in Slate.)

Anthony Van Dyck Painting “Found Online”

A previously unknown painting by the seventeenth-century master Anthony Van Dyck has been identified after being spotted online. The portrait was previously thought to have been a copy and was in storage at the Bowes Museum in County Durham. But it was photographed for a project to put all of the United Kingdom’s oil paintings on the BBC Your Paintings website, where it was seen by an art historian. (Read more at BBC News.)

Can Art Forgers Be Artists Too?

Art forgeries are often decried for crime, but could they be considered art? Many young artists learn to copy the old masters before refining their own work, and contemporary artists often play with ideas of authorship. So can an art forger be considered a legitimate artist? Do they want to make a statement? What motivates art forgers to commit forgery? We spoke with Jonathon Keats, author of Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age. (Read more in the Oxford University Press Blog.)

The End of the Creative Classes in Sight

To put it bluntly, it seems that high-skill occupations can be mechanized and outsourced in much the same way as car manufacturing and personal finance. In recent decades, we have become accustomed to the notion that manual labor has been rendered obsolete, uncompetitive, or poorly paid. But are we now prepared for the same thing to happen to skilled labor, to white-collar workers, to the creative classes? (Read more in the Guardian.)