CAA News Today
Responses to the Trigger-Warnings Survey
posted by Christopher Howard — December 02, 2015
This past spring the National Coalition Against Censorship worked with the Modern Language Association and CAA to produce an online survey of their members regarding trigger warnings and the pressures on instructors. While the survey was not scientific, the over eight hundred responses received offer a bird’s eye view of the debate. Here are some responses to the survey results:
Catherine Rampell, “Young Fogies: Modern Illiberalism Is Led by Students,” Washington Post, November 30, 2015.
Colleen Flaherty, “Trigger Warning Skepticism,” Inside Higher Ed, December 2, 2015.
Robby Soave, “How Trigger Warnings Protect Religious Dogma in the Classroom,” Reason, December 1, 2015.
Tyler Kingkade, “The Prevailing Narrative on Trigger Warnings Is Just Plain Wrong,” Huffington Post, December 1, 2015.
Benjamin Wermund, “Do ‘Trigger Warnings’ Harm Academic Freedom? Most Educators Think So,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2015.
College Fix Staff, “Three in Five Professors Say Trigger Warnings Pose a Threat to Academic Freedom,” College Fix, December 1, 2015.
Leah Libresco, “Most Professors Fear, But Don’t Face, Trigger Warnings,” Five Thirty Eight, December 10, 2015.
Jesse Singal, “Is There Any Evidence Trigger Warnings Are Actually a Big Deal?,” Science of Us, December 6, 2015.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — December 02, 2015
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.
Black Artists and the March into the Museum
After decades of spotty acquisitions, undernourished scholarship, and token exhibitions, American museums are rewriting the history of twentieth-century art to include black artists in a more visible and meaningful way than ever before, playing historical catch-up at full tilt, followed by collectors who are rushing to find the most significant works before they are out of reach. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Can Art Exist on Social Media?
The arrival of a new passport is not usually newsworthy. But in July 2015, when the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei posted a photo of himself with his new passport to Instagram, the world responded with barely contained excitement. The story was covered by the New York Times, CNN, and Time, among others. (Read more from Apollo.)
Carnegie Museum Computer Program Collects Every Detail on Its 30,098 Artworks
Elysa, a computer-software program named for Andrew Carnegie’s housekeeper, cleans up and standardizes information already known about 30,098 artworks in the Carnegie Museum of Art collection. Elysa (pronounced Eliza) breaks apart a paragraph packed with names and dates and organizes it into a format that computers can manipulate or turn into a map. (Read more from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
Will Video Kill the Lecturing Star?
You may have heard about the flipped classroom approach, in which lectures are viewed at home and class time is used for discussion, project work, and other practical exercises. You may also have been wondering whether to bother with it, and how it actually would work in practice. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Google Steps Up to Defend Fair Use, Will Fund YouTubers’ Legal Defenses
After years of missteps, blunders, and disasters in which YouTube users have been censored through spurious copyright claims or had their accounts deleted altogether, Google has announced an amazing, new, user-friendly initiative through which it will fund the legal defense of YouTube creators who are censored by bad-faith copyright-infringement claims. (Read more from Boing Boing.)
The New Art-World Math: What It Really Costs to Run a Gallery
Pity the poor art dealer. Not a phrase you hear a lot in an industry for which the stereotype is of jet setting and high living. But veteran art dealers report that some big things have changed to make it more difficult, and less profitable, to run an art gallery—even in what’s been a booming market for contemporary art. (Read more from the New York Observer.)
Where Is the Union for Arts Admin Workers?
Contrary to what you might expect from a New England–born Irish American whose descendants worked on railroads, pubs, and politics, I was raised with a healthy ambivalence toward unions. But having worked in nonprofits and the arts since before I was legally able, I’ve started to think that there might be some value in bringing the camaraderie and collective bargaining of unions into the arts, specifically on the administrative side. (Read more from HowlRound.)
Art Critics Have Ignored the Condition of Artworks for Too Long
Judging the quality of an artwork must always involve some appreciation of its current condition. This is not to say that an artist’s reputation should be defined by the injuries their work may have suffered over the centuries—although an understanding of the endurance of materials might well be one mark of artistic success. Rather, anyone who enjoys looking closely at works of art should always be conscious that they are unlikely to be presented as they were originally intended or achieved by the artist. (Read more from Apollo.)
Fall 2015 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — December 01, 2015
This fall, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of seven books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The seven Meiss grantees for fall 2015 are:
- Monica Amor, Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944–1968, University of California Press
- Benjamin Anderson, Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art, Yale University Press
- Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics since the 1970s, University of Chicago Press
- Ivan Drpic, Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium, Cambridge University Press
- Frances Guerin, The Truth Is Always Grey: Painting from Grisaille to Gerhard Richter, University of Minnesota Press
- Laura Kalba, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Yun Chiahn Sena, From Archaism to Antiquarianism: Antiquity in Song Culture, University of Washington Press
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
Fall 2015 Recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award
posted by Christopher Howard — November 30, 2015
CAA has announced the five recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award for fall 2015. Thanks to a grant of $60,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA is supporting the work of emerging authors who are publishing monographs on the history of art and related subjects.
The five Meiss/Mellon grantees for fall 2015 are:
- Anastasia Aukeman, Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association, University of California Press
- Mari Dumett, Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living, University of California Press
- Namiko Kunimoto, Anxious Bodies: Gender and Nation in Postwar Art, University of Minnesota Press
- Miya Lippit, Aesthetic Life: The Artistic Discouse of Beauty in Modern Japan, Harvard University Press
- Allison Morehead, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form, Pennsylvania State University Press
The purpose of the Meiss/Mellon subventions is to reduce the financial burden that authors carry when acquiring images for publication, including licensing and reproduction fees for both print and online publications.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — November 25, 2015
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.
Regulating Art That Offends
Almost three months after a racially charged art project stirred controversy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, administrators, faculty members, and students are still deliberating whether to adopt guidelines for public art on campus. At the root of the debate is a series of signs reading “White Only” and “Black Only” that appeared mysteriously and suddenly around campus in September, eliciting fear and shock from students. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Permission to Fail
An artist girlfriend and I used to go to galleries and see shows together. Sometimes when she looked at a piece she would say, “Oh, that’s something I did in art school.” After a while it dawned on me that much of what she dismissed as student exercises—gambits she figured she’d outgrown—were things I liked. I started to think that she had inadvertently taught me, if not a definition of good art, then at least a kind of rule of thumb for identifying it in the field. (Read more from the Nation.)
Free and Easy? DIY Universities
Scholars dissatisfied with their university administrations might ponder the case of the American Marxist academic Allen Krebs, who cofounded two “free universities” on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In 1965, after a falling-out with Adelphi University, where he was assistant professor of sociology, Krebs helped open the Free University of New York, one of the most successful of the first wave of free universities that swept across North America and Western Europe in the 1960s. (Read more from Times Higher Education.)
A Body of Work
I once gave a lecture on Jack Goldstein, an artist synonymous with the Pictures Generation and postmodernism. Others also associate him with romantic failure, with his “disappearance” from the art world in the 1990s and his suicide in 2003. After the talk concluded, an art historian I respect asked me if I thought Goldstein was “a great artist.” I was caught off guard and fumbled for a response. Eventually, I said with some hesitation, “I don’t know.” (Read more from the Brooklyn Rail.)
Our Designers Talk Book Covers
Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the popular adage goes. But, as humans, we often do just that. In this week’s blog post, as part of our 2015 AAUP blog tour, our book designers (Nancy Ovedovitz, design director; James Johnson, senior designer; Sonia Shannon, senior designer; and Mary Valencia, senior designer) discuss the design and creation of book covers. (Read more from Yale Books Unbound.)
Turning a Big-Box Store into an Artist’s Playground
Upon entering a big-box department store, many shoppers fall into a zombielike trance, focusing only on what they need to purchase. Carson Davis Brown felt a bit like that while in the automotive aisle of a Meijer store in Michigan. He was texting with a friend when he suddenly looked down the aisle. “I noticed everything was yellow,” he said. “I did a double take.” (Read more from Slate.)
What If I’ve Never Taught Solo?
I’m always dismayed to hear about departments that don’t let graduate students teach, because the experience of running your own class is an essential element of a competitive record. Sure it’s possible to get a tenure-track job without that experience but it is much, much harder. (Read more from Vitae.)
Going Rogue: Authenticating Warhol after the Board’s Disbanding
This month Richard Polsky launched a Warhol authentication service. It’s a task that is both necessary and risky, given the lengthy, and very costly, legal battles the artist’s prolific output has sparked over the years. After a series of suits resulted in a reported $7 million in legal fees, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which manages the artist’s estate, dissolved the board in 2012. (Read more from Blouin Artinfo.)
2015 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant Winners
posted by Christopher Howard — November 25, 2015
CAA is pleased to announce six 2015 recipients of the annual Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, established in 2005. Thanks to a generous grant from the Wyeth Foundation, these awards are given annually to publishers to support the publication of one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects. For this grant program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The six grantees for 2015 are:
- Anastasia Aukeman, Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association, University of California Press
- Mary Campbell, Civil Saints: Polygamy, Pornography, and Mormon Citizenship in the Work of Charles Ellis Johnson, University of Chicago Press
- Dale Allen Gyure, Serenity and Delight: The Architecture of Minoru Yamasaki, Yale University Press
- Jessica Horton, Places to Stand: Native American Modernisms on an Undivided Earth, Duke University Press
- Rebecca Peabody, Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race, University of California Press
- Nizan Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art, Manchester University Press
Eligible for the grant are book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — November 18, 2015
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.
Internationalization and Tenure
Should universities incorporate internationally focused criteria in their tenure and promotion policies? A majority of institutions (52 percent) have identified internationalization as one of their top five strategic priorities, but only a minority (8 percent) report having guidelines in place specifying international work or experience as a consideration in faculty tenure and promotion decisions. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
“This Is a Genocide”: Art Historian Zainab Bahrani on ISIS’s Destruction of Cultural Heritage
Last year, news outlets began reporting that the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had begun bombing and bulldozing cultural-heritage sites and artifacts, some dating back to ancient times. A few weeks ago, I sat down with Zainab Bahrani, Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology at Columbia University and director of Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments, to ask about her perspective on the matter. (Read more from ARTnews.)
Online Arts Publishing: A Roundtable with Artnet News, Momus, and Temporary Art Review
Everything about publishing is changing, including art criticism and news. What sort of art coverage we consume, how we consume it, and on what devices is rapidly and constantly evolving. If art magazines are dead, then what is taking their place—and why? (Read more from Temporary Art Review.)
Unseen Art Is Crowdfunding an Open-Source Platform to Make Fine Art Accessible via 3D Printing
Making art more accessible to blind and visually impaired people is Unseen Art’s founder Marc Dillon’s new mission. After almost a quarter century working in the mobile industry, he says it’s time to give back. “I’ve been in mobile for twenty-five years nearly and I wanted to do something that gives back to people,” Dillon said. “I wanted to find a place where I could basically find a community that had a need and give back to that, with the experience that I have.” (Read more from TechCrunch.)
Using SmartHistory to Generate Good Conversations in the Art-History Survey
I had been aware of Smarthistory for years, occasionally assigning videos as supplemental readings and directing students to its content. But following their use of the Khan Academy platform in 2011, the site’s content expanded exponentially. Suddenly, there were enough videos on diverse topics that I could assign Smarthistory videos for every topic in my syllabus. (Read more from Smarthistory.)
With $170.4 Million Sale at Auction, Modigliani Work Joins Rarefied Nine-Figure Club
In an overheated art market where anything seems possible, a painting of an outstretched nude woman by the early-twentieth-century artist Amedeo Modigliani sold last week for $170.4 million with fees to Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver turned billionaire art collector, in a packed sales room at Christie’s. It was the second-highest price paid for an artwork at auction. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Why Are Art Galleries White Cubes?
Four white walls and appropriate lighting is the go-to, de facto way of presenting art. But it hasn’t always been that way. The existence of art galleries in general is a relatively new concept in the grand scheme of history. So how did it standardize so quickly? Why is the white cube the “best” place to present art, commercially and institutionally? Will it always be this way? (Read more from Hopes and Fears.)
The Etiquette Minefield of the Interview Meal
As you prepare for the job market you are undoubtedly focusing on your research, polishing your job market paper, and honing your presentation skills. Those absolutely should be your highest priorities. However, when you have time, you should also be sure to brush up on your dining etiquette. It can save you stress and embarrassment later. (Read more from Vitae.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — November 11, 2015
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.
The New Artist’s Medium: Getting Started with Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is invading every industry, but the arts in particular present an excellent opportunity for communicating personal vision. Whether you want to put someone inside a painting, send them into space, or envelop them in a music video, the sensation of “presence” afforded by virtual reality means that your audience is certain to walk away with an unforgettable experience. But where to start? (Read more from Fractured Atlas.)
The Games Art Historians Play: Online Game-Based Learning in Art History and Museum Contexts
I recently posted a query on the Consortium of Art and Architectural Historians listserv to research online game-based and game-ified learning in art history and museums. The post garnered animated comments hinting that it was nothing short of appalling that the subject had even been raised. That listserv discussion suggested there exists considerable confusion about what game-based learning is. (Read more from ProfHacker.)
How Do You Tell the Difference between Philanthropy and a Tax Write-Off?
Many art-world insiders who flew to Los Angeles for the opening of the billionaire Eli Broad’s self-named museum had positive things to say about it. The collection, if familiar, has its strengths. The building, if imperfect, has its moments. Yet occasional sniping could be heard, as in: “I still think this is a huge vanity project” and “It seems like one big tax-break to me.” (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Art Donors Give to Smaller Nonprofits
The Los Angeles art adviser and collector Elaine Gans was uncertain where to donate a large painting by San Francisco Bay Area artist Tom Holland. If she gave it to an art museum, the painting risked being put in storage and forgotten, Gans said. A museum also might not have accepted it, she added. So, earlier this year, she donated the painting to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
What Are Some Good Art Documentaries?
What are some worthwhile art documentaries? I am an art instructor and working on compiling a list of films for my students to watch in their spare time. Any suggestions? (Read more from Burnaway.)
Gallery Guides: Six Gallerists on Their Role in the Art World
Gallerists play a significant role in the art world. While it is true that no two galleries are the same—each operating with distinct missions and each supporting unique groups of artists—their collective importance is increasing as much as it is evolving. To explore this further, I recently talked with six gallerists, taking a closer look at their motivations, responsibilities, and current concerns. (Read more from Visual Arts Journal.)
Detecting a Bad Fit
You took the job because you thought it seemed like a good fit and, after all, it was a tenure-track offer. Then you arrive on the campus only to find yourself trapped in a bog. Maybe the problem is bait-and-switch support, where the department promises much more than it intends or is able to give. Maybe the faculty culture turns out to be toxic, and you spend every day praying for deliverance from your sniping, backstabbing colleagues. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
We’ll Store Your Artifacts, US Tells Syrian Museums
As ISIL destroys ancient temples and monuments across Syria and Iraq, the Association of Art Museum Directors is encouraging American museums to act as safe havens for threatened works of art in the collections of governments, museums, and private individuals in conflict zones. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
JSTOR Migrates to a New Platform
posted by Christopher Howard — November 10, 2015
Over the last year and a half, JSTOR has been making the transition to a new and more flexible technology platform. This shift has been largely behind the scenes, while also simplifying and improving the site experience. Recent changes include:
New citation export and sharing options. Preformatted citations (in MLA, APA and Chicago styles) are now available. These can be exported in formats compatible with common citation management software. Social sharing options that allow for both emailing of citations as well as sharing article links via social media are also available.
New displays of journal content. There are now new journal landing pages and table of contents pages for all titles, as well as a display of title histories, which shows prior and subsequent titles as part of the journal bibliographic information.
An improved experience for books. A new and improved experience for books now mirrors the way journals are treated on JSTOR (including a clear presentation of key functions such as capturing citations and downloading PDFs, and an improved online chapter viewing experience). A new “search within the book” feature has also been introduced.
JSTOR includes what is likely the most substantial online collection of art and architectural history research materials available today. At present, JSTOR includes the complete publication back runs of more than 280 journals and over 1,000 books in these fields, and has worked in deep collaboration with advisors, foundations, museums, and libraries to build out our offerings over time. As a result, we have a network of relationships with the major scholarly art associations, including the College Art Association.
CAA members enjoy discounted access to JSTOR
As part of your membership to CAA, we are delighted to offer the annual JPASS plan for $99. If a year is too long for you, a monthly plan is also available for $19.50. Designed for those with limited or no JSTOR access, JPASS provides unlimited reading and up to 120 article PDF downloads from more than 1,900 journals available in JSTOR, including CAA’s Art Journal and Art Bulletin. That’s more than 300 years of scholarship right at your fingertips. Click here to learn more about College Art Association membership.
Richard J. Powell Is 2016 Distinguished Scholar
posted by Christopher Howard — November 09, 2015
Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he has taught since 1989, has been named CAA’s 2016 Distinguished Scholar. A specialist in American art, African American art, and theories of race and representation, Powell will be honored in February during a special session at CAA’s upcoming Annual Conference in Washington, DC.
Powell was chair of the school’s Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies from 1996 to 2001. He currently is dean of the humanities for the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences at Duke. In 2013, the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art bestowed the Lawrence A. Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence upon Powell for his contributions to the field of American art history.
Powell earned a PhD in art history at Yale University in 1988, after receiving an MA in Afro-American studies in 1982 from the same school. He was awarded Yale’s Wilbur Cross Medal for Distinguished Alumni in 2009; three years later he received the James A. Porter Award for Excellence in African American Art Scholarship from Howard University, where he earned an MFA in printmaking in 1977. Other notable grants, fellowships, and residencies came from the Voyager Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University.
Powell led CAA’s flagship journal, The Art Bulletin, as editor-in-chief from 2008 to 2010. Among his many editorial accomplishments were substantial multiauthor interventions on decentering modernism, organized around an essay by Partha Mitter; on Pablo Picasso during wartime, for which a play by Ariel Dorfman served as anchor; and on Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas in light of postcolonial and materialist discourses. In the latter, for example, lead author Byron Ellsworth Hamann explored the presence in the painting of materials from the Americas, including silver, clay, and the red dye cochineal.
Powell’s books include Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (2008); Black Art: A Cultural History (2002); Jacob Lawrence (1992); and Homecoming: The Art and Life of William H. Johnson (1991), which drew from his dissertation on this twentieth-century American artist. He was the primary or sole author of numerous exhibition catalogues, such as Circle Dance: The Art of John T. Scott (2005); Beauford Delaney: The Color Yellow (2002); To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (1999); and James Lesesne Wells: Sixty Years in Art (1986).
As a curator, Powell has organized and cocurated such exhibitions as Conjuring Bearden at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art (2006); Back to Black: Art, Cinema, and the Racial Imaginary at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (2005); Rhapsodies in Black: The Art of the Harlem Renaissance for the Hayward Gallery in London and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (1997); and The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism for Washington Project for the Arts (1989). His first curated show, Impressions/Expressions: Black American Graphics, appeared at the Studio Museum in Harlem in New York and toured nationally.
The 2016 Distinguished Scholar Session will take place on Thursday, February 4, 2016, 2:30–5:00 PM, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. Powell will be joined by three colleagues: Kobena Mercer, professor of history of art and African American studies at Yale University; Gwen Everett, associate professor of art history at Howard University and associate dean of the school’s Division of Fine Arts; Kellie Jones, associate professor of art history at Columbia University and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Art History and Archaeology; and Suzanne Preston Blier, Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
CAA inaugurated its Distinguished Scholar Session in 2001, first honoring James S. Ackerman of Harvard University. Since then, the organization has recognized many illustrious writers, teachers, and curators, including Leo Steinberg (2002), John Szarkowski (2006), Linda Nochlin (2007), Svetlana Alpers (2009), Jonathan Brown (2011), Rosalind Krauss (2012), and Wen C. Fong (2013).