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.

Florence Tomb Opened in Quest to Find “Mona Lisa”

Scientists in the Italian city of Florence have opened a tomb to extract DNA they hope will identify the model for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The tomb contains the family of Lisa Gherardini, a silk merchant’s wife who is believed to have sat for the artist. It is hoped that DNA will help to identify her from three skeletons found last year in a nearby convent. (Read more from BBC News.)

Open Content: An Idea Whose Time Has Come

The Getty has become an even more engaged digital citizen, one that shares its collections, research, and knowledge more openly than ever before. The institution has launched the Open Content Program to share—freely and without restriction—as many of its digital resources as possible. The program’s initial focus is to make available all images of public-domain artworks in the Getty’s collections. (Read more in the Getty Iris.)

Judge Upholds Artist’s Right to Photograph Unsuspecting Neighbors

New York’s Supreme Court has decided that the photographer Arne Svenson was within his rights to display and advertise a series of photographs he took of his neighbors without their permission. In May, a couple sued Svenson for violating their privacy after recognizing their young children in two of the images. The judge dismissed the suit, writing that the family’s right to privacy “yields to an artist’s protections under the First Amendment in the circumstances presented here.” (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

What’s a Blog Post Worth?

Which ultimately does more good: an article or monograph that is read by twenty or thirty people in a narrow field, or a blog post on a topic of interest to many (such as grading standards or tenure requirements) that is read by 200,000? What if the post spurs hundreds of comments, is debated publicly in faculty lounges and classrooms, and gets picked up by newspapers and websites across the country—in other words, it helps to shape the national debate over some hot-button issue? (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

A Mentoring Manifesto

“Transformative,” “career-changing,” and “life-altering”: are these words that tenure-track faculty members in your department use to describe the mentoring they receive? In this final column in the series on “How to Mentor New Faculty,” I want to lay out the biggest lessons that my department has learned about mentoring and encourage you to imagine how they might apply to your campus environment. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

A Page from Our Handbook: Writing about Your Work

Many of the materials you produce on behalf of your work—from artist’s statements to media releases to proposals to simple emails—involve a good bit of writing. In some cases you are writing about a project or series that you haven’t yet made. What you need to know in a nutshell is this: writing about your work is essential, but you can find a way to make it great, useful, more fun, and easier. (Read more from Creative Capital.)

The Utility of Bad Art

The father of consumer choice theory, Alfred Marshall, believed that the more of something you have the less of it you want: a phenomenon economists call diminishing marginal utility. However this was only taken to be the case for an individual at one point in time, not over his entire life. Addiction could prompt us to learn to like something if we consume more of it. The more we listen to good music, the more we want to buy. Modern economists are more skeptical about our aesthetic judgment. (Read more in the Economist.)

Ten of the Most Expensive Artworks on Amazon Art

Amazon has embarked on what might be its classiest endeavor yet: a fine-arts marketplace. Yes, the internet’s behemoth middleman is working with more than 150 galleries and 4,500 artists to offer a wide variety of paintings, photographs, and mixed-media masterpieces to online shopping addicts everywhere. While critics have been quick to comment on the strange partnership between a giant internet marketplace and the insular fine-arts world, this gallery experiment could have a positive impact. (Read more in the Huffington Post.)