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.

DIY Careers: How to Get Paid for Your Art

Often the biggest unknown in launching a DIY career is accounting. Most of us who go down this road are artists of one kind or another, so we don’t necessarily bring a lot of business acumen to the venture. We know how to create but not how to monetize our creation. Of course, not everyone is interested in assigning a value to their art, but anyone who is needs to incorporate some basic business knowledge into their creative endeavor. (Read more from Vitae.)

How Do Award-Winning Artists Spend Their Prize Money

The modern artist faces a conundrum: good work needs time and space, imaginative and physical. But making work also costs money; studios and materials don’t come cheap, and even aesthetes have to eat. So you get a job that pays … then you don’t have the time—or headspace—to make the work. We hear about the super-successful celebrity artists who make a fortune, but they are the minority. For emerging artists, making work and making ends meet is rarely easy. (Read more from the Independent.)

Full Ninth Circuit to Review California Resale Royalty Act En Banc

Several weeks ago, the parties to the appeal over the constitutionality of the California Resale Royalty Act briefed the question about whether the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals should hear the case, rather than a three-judge panel that would otherwise be assigned to the case. The Ninth Circuit granted the petition in late October, meaning the appeal will now go before the full court. The issue in the case is a California law that requires royalties on secondary sales of art, something that is not part of US copyright law and is more common in civil law countries as “droit de suite.” (Read more from the Art Law Report.)

If Artists Need to Know about VARA, So Do Judges

On August 11, 2010, Gasser Grunert Gallery in Manhattan sold Jomar Statkun’s painting Tubal Cain at Beggar’s Creek (2009) to an art collector for $16,000. Less a 50 percent commission, Statkun walked away with an $8,000 sale. At a party two years later, Statkun met a former employee of the gallery who told him that the gallery facilitated that sale by cropping ten inches off the painting to suit the space needs of the collector. (Read more from re:sculpt.)

How We Look When We Look at a Painting

Among the abounding fascinations of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a three-hour documentary about the museum on London’s Trafalgar Square, is a leitmotif of lingering shots of solitary viewers of paintings. Looking at art may be the most unguarded action that we perform in public. We aren’t aware of performing, of course, nor do we openly watch one another doing so. Wiseman’s studies of people entranced, or stupefied, by Leonardos and Vermeers amount to a pictorial essay on self-forgetting: faces young and old, plain and fancy, each as vulnerable as that of a sleepwalker. (Read more from the New Yorker.)

At Harvard, Three Become One

Three institutions will be united under one roof when the Harvard Art Museums reopen after a six-year building project. The Renzo Piano–designed scheme on the edge of the Harvard campus doubles the museums’ combined square footage, increasing gallery space by 40 percent. But the changes at Harvard extend well beyond bricks and mortar and creating extra space to show more of its 250,000-strong art collection. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

On Elite Campuses, an Arts Race

Closed for six years, the Harvard Art Museums reopen after a radical overhaul by the architect Renzo Piano. He saved only the shell of the chaste, red-bricked Fogg Museum and its interior courtyard, extending it upward in sheets of glass and elegant truss work. Galleries wrap the new public space, but so do a materials lab, an art-conservation suite, and a study center, where students, faculty, and visitors can learn from the collection of 250,000 objects. (Read more from the New York Times.)

What the Midterm Elections Mean for the Arts: Summary of 2014 Election

In this year’s midterm elections, Republicans took back the Senate, kept control of the House, and won governorships in thirty-one states and counting. What does that mean for you and for us, as strong advocates of the arts and arts education? Here we break down the national, state, and local results—and their potential impact on the arts. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)