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.

Images of Works of Art in Museum Collections: The Experience of Open Access

This report describes the current approach of eleven art museums in the United States and the United Kingdom to the use of images of works of art in their collections, where the underlying works are in the public domain. Each approach is slightly different. By presenting the thought processes and methods of these institutions, this report aims to inform the decision making of other museums that are considering open access to images in their collections. (Read more from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.)

SNAAP Report Focuses on the Impact of Gender, Race, and Socioeconomic Status on Arts Graduates

Findings from a national study released last week by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) show that a postsecondary arts education affords some unique advantages for women, minorities, and disadvantaged students. However, significant gaps remain and inequalities persist related to school debt, racial diversity within artistic occupations, and disparities in earnings by gender. The report, An Uneven Canvas: Inequalities in Artistic Training and Careers, details findings from more than 65,000 arts alumni of all ages from 120 institutions in the United States and Canada. (Read more from Indiana University.)

Warhol Foundation Settles Case against Insurance Firm

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has reached a settlement with the Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company, ending a case that lasted more than two years. The company agreed to pay the “lion’s share” of the foundation’s legal fees stemming from two lawsuits brought by the collectors Joe Simon and Susan Shaer in 2007, according to a press release from the foundation. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

Of Mice and Manet

The humble mouse is a doughty workhorse of science. Every day, in laboratories around the world, the little critters are subjected to all manner of carefully controlled insults, from electric shocks to the induction of cancer, all in the name of research. But the mice in the lab of Shigeru Watanabe, a psychologist at Keio University in Japan, have a more enjoyable life than most. Specifically, he is exploring their taste in fine art. (Read more in the Economist.)

Five Facts about Professional Artists in the United States

Instagram and Etsy have made everyone seem like artistic geniuses, but according to the National Endowment for the Arts, artists make up only 1.4 percent of the US labor force. Last week, we learned much more about the roughly 2 million artists in the workforce thanks to the NEA study, “Equal Opportunity Data Mining: National Statistics about Working Artists.” The study, based on census data, classifies artists by occupation, demographics, and region. Here are five of the more surprising findings. (Read more in the Washington Post.)

Museums Faulted on Restitution of Nazi-Looted Art

Not until 1998, when forty-four nations including the United States signed the groundbreaking Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, did governments and museums formally embrace the idea that they have a special responsibility to repair the damage caused by the wholesale looting of art owned by Jews during the Third Reich’s reign. Now, fifteen years later, historians, legal experts, and Jewish groups say that some American museums have backtracked on their pledge to settle Holocaust recovery claims on the merits. (Read more in the New York Times.)

The Googleheim Museum of Art

Google may have set out to “organize the world’s information,” but thanks to the creativity of a huge variety of artists, designers, hackers, and other tinkerers it’s become something else: an art museum hidden within a search engine. Because a slew of people have found clever ways to exploit or misuse Google’s tools and algorithms and endless troves of data, Google has accidentally become a mother lode of artistic inspiration (and, often humorously, a passive artistic collaborator.) (Read more from Yahoo News.)

Amazon to Launch Virtual Art Gallery

Amazon.com is expected to launch an online art gallery later this year. The online retailer of books, electronics, and apparel aims to offer over 1,000 art objects from at least 125 galleries, according to dealers who have been approached by the website’s business-development group. Amazon executives told one dealer that 109 galleries have already agreed to participate. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)