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.

Should Art Grants Be Awarded to Artists Who Don’t Need the Money?

When talking to the founders of the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award in Seattle, I was trying to raise a general discussion around the fact that many arts funders don’t take financial need into account when deciding who gets their money. I’m not talking about making need the decisive factor. I’m talking about making it one factor among several. (Read more from the Stranger.)

The Most Relevant Art Today Is Taking Place outside the Art World

When artists operate outside the gallery space, whether because their work functions best there or because they are forced to, they are both creating valuable art and making the limitations of traditional art institutions visible—physically, historically, and conceptually. Perhaps such work can even change those institutions, those structures of looking. (Read more from Artsy.)

The Robots Are Coming

Artists as diverse as Rachel Whiteread, Oscar Murillo, and Yayoi Kusama are beginning to use the high-tech fabrication methods once available to only the most commercially successful artists. Lower-cost robots that mimic an artist’s arm movements and joints are starting to replace the pricey computer-numerical-control machines that Jeff Koons uses to produce his sleek, industrial aesthetic. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

The Secret to All Great Art Forgeries

In A Forger’s Tale, the convicted forger Shaun Greenhalgh reveals that he drew Leonardo da Vinci’s La Bella Principessa, which has been valued upwards of $100 million. Greenhalgh even admits that he modeled the subject after a supermarket checkout girl. If his claims are true, how did this forgery go unnoticed for so long? How did it pass the sniff tests of so many art historians and purported experts? (Read more from the New Republic.)

College Degree Gap Grows Wider for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos

The racial gap in who’s graduating from college has widened since 2007, a new report shows. While more blacks and Latinos are graduating from college now, the percentage of whites graduating has grown even faster. About 33 percent of African American adults had at least a two-year college degree in 2015, up from about 28 percent in 2007. For Latinos, that figure grew to about 23 percent from 19 percent, while whites grew to 47 percent from 41 percent. (Read more from the Hechinger Report.)

Translating Research into Practice

During the past twenty years, college and university faculty have begun to utilize several areas of the learning sciences, including cognitive psychology, to inform pedagogy. Much of this work has happened in ways that have helped our profession to more effectively teach and our students to more effectively learn. However, we still have much work to do if we claim that we have a well-developed set of tools that can be applied across disciplines. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

Helen Molesworth’s Permanent-Collection Show at MOCA Is Upending the Story of Art

Enter the permanent collection galleries of any museum of modern and contemporary art in the United States and it’s likely you’ll lay eyes on a familiar story: the muscular narrative of the Abstract Expressionists attacking their canvases, continuing through the pathways of 1960s Pop and 1970s Minimalism before landing at the Neoexpressionism of the 1980s. Pay a visit to Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, however, and you will see that story turned on its head. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

What Money Can Buy

The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money. (Read more from the New Yorker.)