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.

Can—and Should—Charitable Foundations Help Rescue Detroit Pensions and DIA Artwork?

National and local foundations have been asked to help bail out Detroit. But getting them to open their checkbooks will be a complicated dance of priorities, politics, and practicalities. The federal mediator in the Detroit bankruptcy is asking a group of at least nine local and national foundations to consider collectively contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to solve two of the most contentious issues in the case: municipal pensions on the chopping block and Detroit Institute of Arts paintings on the auction block. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)

Christie’s Price-Tagging of DIA Artwork for Bankruptcy Planning Is Delayed

A highly anticipated evaluation of thousands of city-owned treasures at the Detroit Institute of Arts is not expected to be finished until at least the second week of December. The report from Christie’s auction house in New York, which Detroit officials previously said would be completed in October or November, is expected to have a major impact on the fate of the museum’s world-class collection. The report also will likely influence negotiations between emergency manager Kevyn Orr and creditors and the settlement plan Orr eventually submits in court. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)

A Real Pollock? On This, Art and Science Collide

For nearly sixty years, a small painting with swirls and splotches of red, black, and silver has stood as a symbol of enmity between two women: Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock’s widow, and Ruth Kligman, his lover. Until her death, in 2010, Kligman, herself an artist, insisted the painting was a love letter to her created by Pollock in the summer of 1956, just weeks before he died in a car crash. But the painting was rejected by an expert panel set up to authenticate and catalogue all of Pollock’s works by a foundation established by Krasner. (Read more from the New York Times.)

German “Lost Art” Register Posts Further Pictures

German authorities released more pictures and details of the massive trove of art that was discovered in a Munich apartment last year. Prosecutors gave the official “Lost Art” website permission to put an additional fifty-four entries online, taking the total to seventy-nine. The new items include works by the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and the German impressionist Max Liebermann. (Read more from USA Today.)

Dealer’s Hand

David Zwirner, the son of a famous German dealer, opened his first gallery in 1993, in SoHo. Since then, he has risen to be one of the most prominent dealers in the world. He is not really a pioneer, in terms of the art he has championed, or the style in which he has presented it, or the people he has sold it to. He is, in many respects, one more boat on a rising tide. (Read more from the New Yorker.)

The (Off-Campus) Future of MIT

Anant Agarwal has quit cold turkey—coffee, that is. But the president of edX, the massive open online course provider cofounded by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is as energetic about MOOCs as ever, despite almost daily calls from traditionalists for the death of his product. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Resurgent Interest in Performance-Based Funding for Higher Education

Observers of higher-education policy might be forgiven a sense of surprise at recent developments in the funding of state higher-education systems. At the turn of the century, after indifferent results and occasional policy debacles, it was easy to find commentary from chastened proponents on the declining commitments to performance-based funding and budgeting systems for public higher education. Yet in recent years, performance funding has risen from the near dead, returning forcefully to the policy and political agendas of many states. What factors have driven this resurgence? (Read more from the American Association of University Professors.)

Art Makes You Smart

For many education advocates, the arts are a panacea: they supposedly increase test scores, generate social responsibility, and turn around failing schools. Most of the supporting evidence, though, does little more than establish correlations between exposure to the arts and certain outcomes. A few years ago, however, through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, scientists were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes. (Read more from the New York Times.)