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.

Sustaining Open Access

A recently proposed model on open-access publishing has drawn praise for rethinking the roles institutions, libraries, and professional organizations play in promoting scholarly communication, but can its collaborative structure be sustained? The proposal envisions stakeholders forming partnerships, each handling one or more of the duties of funding, distributing, and preserving open-access scholarly research—specifically in the humanities and social sciences. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Detroit’s Clever and Likely Illegal Art-for-Pensions Deal

The $816 million art-for-pensions deal that is designed to preserve the Detroit Institute of Arts collection is fascinating, imaginative, and clever. But it’s almost certainly illegal. And I’ll show you why. (Read more from the Washington Post.)

Artworks for Sale Online: It’s a Booming Way to Gatecrash the Elite Gallery World

The World Wide Web is frequently cast as the great enemy of traditional culture, undermining the music industry, the film industry, and publishing. Yet one form of art has now found a way through—perhaps even a way to thrive—and provide careers for artists of the future. The visual arts are booming online. Experienced art collectors and newcomers are both increasingly using websites to find original contemporary works and ordering them for delivery like furniture. (Read more from the Guardian.)

What’s the Most Common Mistake Artists Make?

Your question has set my head spinning. There are so many possibilities. So many mistakes that artists make—like not taking the business side of art seriously or only taking it seriously in the middle of a crisis when, as I mentioned in my last post, it is too late. Or romanticizing the “starving artist” notion. Or allowing themselves to become resentful of other artists’ success. (Read more from KCET.)

The Paradox of Art as Work

There are few modern relationships as fraught as the one between art and money. Are they mortal enemies, secret lovers, or perfect soul mates? Is the bond between them a source of pride or shame, a marriage of convenience, or something tawdrier? The way we habitually think and talk about these matters betrays a deep and venerable ambivalence. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Flipped Learning Skepticism: Do Students Want to Have Lectures?

Students in a flipped classroom are rebelling because they want you to lecture to them and to explain how to do everything so that they can earn a top grade in the class. Here are some responses to this issue that one could make. (Read more from Casting Out Nines.)

Teaching Outside Your Subject Area

This spring Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) asked Jenn Ball if it could facilitate a project with her students with the intent of posting the process on the AHTR site. At her suggestion, the discussion focused on teaching a unit in the survey outside of one’s area of expertise, something art history professors are faced with each semester. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

Sixteen Artist Hangouts You Can Still Go To

Since the days of Hemingway and Faulkner, bars and cafes where writers, painters, and performance artists go to procrastinate have often caught the public’s imagination. The romance of the artist’s hangout is irresistible. From rivalries fermented over drinks to witty one-liners exchanged by Dorothy Parker and her well-read pals, these are the places of a struggling artist’s networking dreams. Even better, some of the most iconic artist hangouts and literary pubs that continue to welcome patrons today. (Read more from CNN.)