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.

Colleges Are Slashing Adjuncts’ Hours to Skirt New Rules on Health-Insurance Eligibility

Allison G. Armentrout, an adjunct instructor at Stark State College, doesn’t get paid by the hour. She earns $4,600 to teach two English composition courses. But now she carefully tracks how many hours she works on an electronic time sheet. On a recent week, she spent three hours preparing for her lectures, close to six hours in the classroom, and sixteen more grading assignments for a grand total of about twenty-five hours. She came in under the college’s new twenty-nine-hour-a-week wire designed to keep her ineligible for health-care coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Women on the Verge

A lady in a bonnet is shaking up the art world. When After Lunch, Berthe Morisot’s portrait of a doe-eyed woman, sold for $10.9 million in February, it set a record as the most expensive work by a female artist ever sold at auction. It also helped power a wave of interest among collectors and dealers looking to identify undervalued female artists. While an age-old debate rages over whether talent, sexism, or lack of promotion has held many women out of the art world’s boys club, everyone agrees that prices for female artists have always lagged behind those of their male counterparts. (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)

Born Digital: Rhizome’s Heather Corcoran

When Heather Corcoran was appointed executive director of the art and technology nonprofit Rhizome last summer—replacing the long-time director Lauren Cornell, who had resigned in the spring to curate the New Museum’s triennial with Ryan Trecartin—she was an unknown quantity in New York. Nevertheless, her entire career has focused on the overlapping fields of contemporary art and technology (mostly in the United Kingdom), making the twenty-nine-year-old Canadian a good fit for Rhizome. (Read more in Art in America.)

Meet the First Digital Generation. Now Get Ready to Play by Their Rules

Anna Daniszewski, a sophomore at Bard College, takes a dozen or more cell-phone pictures daily, usually around dusk or after dark—moody shots of found objects, bare branches against a gray sky, or lighted windows in the distance, evoking the way sensitive, artistic young men and women have always felt about life. You can totally imagine Goethe doing the same thing, preserving each precious instant of angst for the posterity that would someday recognize his genius. Except Daniszewski doesn’t preserve them all—she is embracing the ephemeral. (Read more in Wired.)

Open Access: Four Ways It Could Enhance Academic Freedom

Are politicians stealing our academic freedom? Is their fetish with open-access publishing leading to a “pay to say” system for the rich? And will the trendy goal of making publicly financed research freely available skew the world of scholarship even further toward the natural sciences? I don’t think so. But it took me a while to get there. (Read more in the Guardian.)

Credit without Teaching

Earlier this year Capella University and the new College for America began enrolling hundreds of students in academic programs without courses, teaching professors, grades, deadlines, or credit-hour requirements, but with a path to genuine college credit. The two institutions are among a growing number that are giving competency-based education a try. Students can earn credit by successfully completing assessments that prove their mastery in predetermined competencies or tasks—maybe writing in a business setting or using a spreadsheet to perform calculations. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

Spirituality and Sprite, Aisle 1? What an Artist Sees in Walmart

Most people would be hard-pressed to call Walmart a source of artistic inspiration. Yet that’s exactly what the artist Brendan O’Connell sees in the sprawling big-box stores. For the past decade, O’Connell has been snapping photographs inside dozens of Walmarts. The images have served as inspiration for an ongoing series of paintings of everyday life—much of which involves shopping, which he calls “that great contemporary pastime.” (Read more from National Public Radio.)

Top 10 Online Colleges Names the “Top 30 Most Beautiful College Art Galleries”

A website dedicated to college rankings, Top 10 Online Colleges, recently named the “30 Most Beautiful College Art Galleries” in the world. The international list is based on qualities such as reputation, location, architecture, history, and artistic culture, making a handy web resource for students to learn more about the role of fine arts in college life. (Read more at BWW Art World.)