CAA News Today
A Visit with CAA 2016 Keynote Speaker Tania Bruguera at the Havana Biennial
posted by Christopher Howard — November 04, 2015
Kate Flint, Provost Professor of Art History and English at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, wrote an article for Public Books on her experiences at the Havana Biennial, which was held May 22–June 22, 2015. In her text, titled “Breaking Down Walls at the Havana Biennial” and published on November 1, Flint describes her encounters with works of art throughout the city. Here is one experience:
Many works of art on show in the “Zona Franca” were overtly political: Michel Mirabal’s distressed and fragmenting Cuban and American flags; Luis Camejo’s delicate drawings of Cuban monuments collapsed, flooded, overgrown at the end of the third millennium; Arlés del Rio’s La necesidad de otros aires (The Need for Other Airs), an entire room filled with breathing tubes hanging from the ceiling, like elongated snorkels, reminding us that being choked by police, or by political or social constraints, or, for that matter, by pollution (and deep concern for the environment was a frequently occurring theme at the Biennale) is a global, as well as a local, concern.
Flint, who traveled to Cuba as part of a trip organized by CAA, participated in a performance work by Tania Bruguera, the artist who will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Flint wrote:
During the Biennial’s first weekend, Bruguera staged a hundred-hour reading of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism. Seated inside her own home, she was breaking no laws (she asked for, but was told she didn’t need, a police permit). The reading—usually in Spanish—was broadcast through loudspeakers, muted at night, to the street outside…. The readings were carried out by those who signed up on a sheet inside space, bare but for a chair, video camera, treats brought by supporters, and a tethered dove…. I was about the 124th person to sign up to read. About an hour later, I was invited to sit in the chair. I’d only intended to read a short paragraph, but no one around seemed to want to take over. Indeed, people seemed to be clearing up their things. Seven pages of Arendt (in Spanish) later, Bruguera herself came over and took the book from me, finished that particular paragraph, and we all exited.
You can also read another article on the same trip to Cuba, written by Katherine Jánszky Michaelsen, professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, on the CAA website.
The next CAA-sponsored trip is the Turkish-Islamic Art Study Tour, taking place June 3–18, 2016. For more information, please visit CAA’s international tours page.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — November 04, 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.
New Data on Adjuncts
Teaching is the primary source of income for nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of adjunct faculty members, and two-thirds have actively sought a tenure-track position. Some 38 percent have been on the market for a tenure-track job for five or more years. Those are some of the preliminary findings of a survey of part-time faculty members released last week by the New Faculty Majority. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
College Students Say Campus Is Too PC, but Also Love Trigger Warnings
A newly commissioned poll suggests that a majority of American college students approve of campus speech restrictions, and nearly a third believe the First Amendment is “outdated.” The poll was commissioned by the William F. Buckley Jr. Program, a Yale University organization that describes its mission as promoting intellectual diversity on campus. It asked undergraduate students around the country about their views on a variety of free-speech topics. (Read more from the Daily Caller.)
Digital Preservation in the Artist’s Studio
The artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer recently wrote a great manifesto about the conservation of time-based media artworks. He mentions how the great majority of artists feel they are too busy keeping their studio running to think about conservation — let alone digital preservation. He goes on to frame conservation as a business opportunity for artists, showing them that they can offer maintenance of their work as a service to be monetized. (Read more from Medium.)
Come Right In: Artists in Residence Put Out the Welcome Mat
Artist-in-residence programs, which number in the hundreds across the United States, have been evolving in ways that benefit not only artists but also visitors. Ranging from a program in the Golden Gate Recreational Area in San Francisco to initiatives at scattered temporary quarters in lower Manhattan, artist-in-residence programs offer courses for children and adults, studio visits, performances, and exhibitions of work by the artists—and even opportunities to dine with them. (Read more from the New York Times.)
The Ins and Outs of Art Gallery Waiting Lists
When it comes to works by successful artists, demand often exceeds supply. Enter the waiting list. Galleries and dealers increasingly offer waiting lists to would-be purchasers of some of the most-sought-after works in the art market. No doubt, many collectors assume that such a list represents a kind of agreement, that those on the list are part of an orderly process that gives them a much better chance of obtaining a highly desired artwork. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Google’s Court Victory Is Good for Scholarly Authors. Here’s Why
The Authors Guild has lost the latest round of the copyright battle that it brought against Google more than a decade ago. And though the guild has decried the appellate court’s ruling as “damaging” to authors, it is nothing of the sort. The decision is actually a substantial boon for authors, especially scholarly ones, for at least four reasons. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Arts Salary Survey Reveals Stark Gender Pay Gap
The gender pay gap in the arts sector is greater than the national UK average, with women earning up to £5,000 less than men at similar stage in their careers, despite being better educated, according to the latest Arts Professional survey. Although women in full-time salaried work in the arts sector outnumbered men by two-to-one last year, the average earnings of the men were higher than the women in almost every type of job, art form, region, and age group. (Read more from Arts Professional.)
Ghost in the Machine
For years now there has been talk of a schism between the respective tribes of book and screen, between those whose medium relies on diligent, contemplative immersion and those who favor the more frictionless rewards of speed. In this conflict, the literary community has more often found itself on the defensive. (Read more from Boston Review.)
Tania Bruguera Will Deliver Conference Keynote Address
posted by Christopher Howard — October 29, 2015
Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist who works in performance, installation, and video, will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. Convocation, which includes the presentation of the 2016 Awards for Distinction, will take place on Wednesday evening, February 3, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. Free and open to the public, this event will be held at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. The title of Bruguera’s talk will be “Aest-ethics: Art with Consequences.”
Bruguera’s work on issues of free speech and immigration and her fearlessness to speak out against forces of oppression—many of which she has experienced firsthand in Cuban prisons—is important and undeniably relevant to not just the art and academic worlds, but also the world at large. This summer, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs jointly appointed Bruguera as their first artist-in-residence. The announcement of the position also revealed that the Museum of Modern Art had acquired its first work by Bruguera: Untitled (Havana, 2000), a large-scale installation that combines performance and video. First shown at the 2000 Havana Biennial, the work, like many others by Bruguera, deals with liberty and authority. The artist was also recently nominated as a finalist for the prestigious 2016 Huge Boss Prize, awarded every two years by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to an artist who has made a visionary contribution to contemporary art.
Bruguera’s work has been exhibited in museums and biennials around the world; she has also lectured and performed internationally. A faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she lives and works in Havana and Chicago. Bruguera earned MFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Instituto Superior de Arte in Cuba. Her BFA is from Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro. Bruguera is the founder and director of Cátedra Arte de Conducta, the first program of performance-art-studies in Latin America, hosted by Instituto Superior de Arte.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 28, 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.
How to Document Heritage Sites under Threat
A major conference in Berlin to be held November 19–20 will bring together advocates to discuss how digital technology is being used to preserve the world’s heritage sites. “Resilience through Innovation” has been organized by CyArk, a California-based nonprofit organization that uses digital scanning to create a free-to-access online three-dimensional archive of heritage sites. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Ten Art-World Survival Tips They Didn’t Teach You in School
So you want to get a master of fine arts degree. But how well will your MFA program prepare you for life as a professional artist? The number of graduates from art MFA programs has doubled from 1987 to 2012, while BFA graduates have nearly tripled during the same time frame. Artnet News asked current students and recent graduates to share their advice for getting ahead. (Read more from Artnet News.)
A Look at the Museum of the Future
Museums are flirting with change that may be more revolutionary than at any other point in their history. The forces rocking the technology world—cheaper screens, miniaturized mechanics, and increased computing power—are prompting a rich period of experimentation in exhibition design. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
The Digital Innovations Seven LA Museums Are Most Excited About
Even though museum collections often go back hundreds—even millions—of years, these visitor-reliant institutions must stay relevant in the twenty-first century. There is healthy debate about how much technology is too much, and when and where within a museum it is appropriate to use technology, but there is little debate about the fact that technology is here to stay. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Back to the Drawing Board: The Crafty Art Students Rejecting Digital
Once it had connotations of classroom cutting and sticking or haberdashery departments, but today the word “craft” represents a movement of makers investing time in mastering skills, experimenting with design, and laboring over one handmade object at a time. Against a backdrop of the 3D printing revolution, craft is still going strong, and many young people across the UK are still interested in learning traditional techniques such as stone carving, silver smithing, and wood work. (Read more from the Guardian.)
For Obamas, a More Abstract Choice of Art
This past summer, President Barack Obama spent nearly an hour at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the nation’s largest repository of paintings and sketches by Edward Hopper. He also could have seen a few Hoppers at home. Two of the artist’s classic depictions of the American landscape—Cobb’s Barns, South Truro and Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro—now hang on the southeast side of the Oval Office and are part of a years-long shift by Obama and his wife, who have put their more modern aesthetic imprint on the White House. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Going through the Motions? The 2015 Survey of Faculty Workplace Engagement
Employee engagement is an important metric that can gauge how loyal and intrinsically interested people are in their work. So how engaged are faculty members, and how do they compare to other kinds of workers? A new Inside Higher Ed survey suggests that while faculty members over all aren’t actively engaged in their work, those at smaller, private institutions tend to be the most emotionally and intellectually connected to what they do. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Academic Book as Expensive, Nihilistic Hobby
I just got word from my editor at Northwestern University Press that my first (and last) academic monograph, Kafka and Wittgenstein, has been sent to the printer. My feelings about this range from mild pride, to medium-grade nihilism, to wide-ranging annoyance at a publication model that still depends on a tenure system that is largely extinct. (Read more from Vitae.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 21, 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.
2016 World Monuments Watch List
The 2016 World Monuments Watch features fifty sites in thirty-six countries that are at risk from the forces of nature and the impact of social, political, and economic change. (Read more from World Monuments Fund.)
Appeals Court Gives Google a Clear and Total Fair-Use Win on Book Scanning
The Authors Guild’s never-ending lawsuit against Google for its book-scanning project has been hit with yet another blow. The Second Circuit appeals court has told the Authors Guild (once again) that Google’s book scanning is transformative fair use. (Read more from Techdirt.)
Why Absolutely Everyone Hates Renoir
When God-Hates-Renoir protesters recently rallied outside the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, there was only one reason why anyone might have been surprised to see them there. The museum isn’t mounting a big Renoir show, or celebrating the artist in some other way. Any institution foolhardy enough to do so knows by now to expect some kind of pushback, because everyone hates Renoir, and everyone always has. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
The Value of Randomness in Art and Design
Ask a designer or artist if any aspect of their process is random. The answer will likely reveal a complex relationship between human cognition, digital media, authorship, and even conceptions of reality and the divine. For those of us who work in computational media to make art, the question can be even more focused: When and why do you use a “random()” function when you write code? (Read more from Fast Company.)
Study Sends “Wake-Up Call” about Black and Latino Arts Groups’ Meager Funding
Sending a “wake-up call” to arts donors, a new national study paints a bleak economic picture of African American and Latino nonprofit museums and performing arts companies. The report finds that when large, mainstream arts organizations stage black- or Latino-themed performances or exhibitions, they siphon away artistic talent, donations, and attendance from smaller groups. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Art and the #FergusonSyllabus
This past summer I led a seminar, titled “The Local Global: American Art and Globalization in the Digital Age,” that was inspired by the #FergusonSyllabus movement, started by the Georgetown history professor Marcia Chatelain last year in the wake of Michael Brown’s death, the protests in Ferguson, and the delayed start to school. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Partial Credit: The 2015 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology
Schools have spent hundreds of millions on technology they believe will improve student outcomes and simplify administrative tasks. Educational technology companies continue to demolish investment records on a quarterly basis. With all this money spent under the guise of improving postsecondary education, the 2015 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggests that many instructors believe the gains in student learning justify the costs. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Me and My Shadow CV
This fall I’m serving as the designated coach for doctoral students in my department who are on the academic job market. They’re a talented group, with impressive skills, hopes, and dreams. I’m grateful to be guiding them, as they put their best selves before search committees. However, one part of the work is not all that pleasant: I also need to ready them to face mass rejection. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
What’s New with ACLS Humanities E-Book?
posted by Christopher Howard — October 15, 2015
October … shorter days, cooler nights, pumpkin spice in everything, and ACLS Humanities E-Book’s launch of Round 12! This recently released collection of 370 scholarly books offers new titles selected by scholars and learned societies. ACLS Humanities E-Book is the online publisher of CAA’s monographs, and this partnership has helped to develop an essential resource in art history and architecture.
Round 12 includes four winners of CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, all published by Princeton University Press:
- The Sculpture of Donatello by H. W. Janson (1957)
- Esprit De Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War 1914–1925 by Kenneth Silver (1989)
- Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance by John Shearman (1992)
- Lorenzo Ghiberti by Richard Krautheimer (1956)
Eighteen titles in the Villa I Tatti series, published in collaboration with Harvard University Press and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, are also featured as part of ACLS Humanities E-Book’s online collection. Since 1961, the Villa I Tatti program has welcomed over one thousand fellows working in the fields of Italian Renaissance art, history, literature, and music. The research center has thus generated some of the most significant scholarship on the Italian Renaissance published over the last decades.
Subscriptions to Humanities E-Book are available to individual and institutional members of CAA. Individuals should write to subscriptions@hebook.org; institutions should contact lwalton@hebook.org.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 14, 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.
Guardian of the Humanities
William “Bro” Adams is the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency that awards grants to researchers and cultural institutions to preserve America’s heritage. In an interview with Tom Fox, he discussed his mission at the NEH and his views on leading this federal organization. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
The NEA at 50 and the Death of the Public Good
Fifty years after the National Endowment for the Arts was founded, the agency struggles, doing great work despite being the victim of an unrelenting and highly successful conservative assault on the public sector that began with the election of Ronald Reagan and continues to this day. The NEA’s 2015 budget allocation clocked in at a mere $146 million, which accounts for 0.012 percent of total federal discretionary spending. (Read more from Culturebot.)
How an Art-History Class Became More Engaging with Twitter
When I was a college student, art-history courses revolved around a 1960s-era carousel slide projector. Its monotonous humming and clicking in the darkened lecture hall often put my classmates to sleep. As I prepared to teach my own art-history course last year, I wanted to implement new technologies to make the lectures more interactive and relatable to a twenty-first-century audience. (Read more from the Conversation.)
Can I Reuse a Past Show’s Title?
I’m a painter and had an exhibition in another state two months ago that comprised many of the pieces in the one I’m installing at a new gallery in a few weeks. Can or should I give the show the same title? Or should I come up with something new, since I’m showing some new work too? (Read more from Burnaway.)
Art Forgers Beware: DNA Could Thwart Fakes
Eric Fischl remembers the time a friend waved a catalogue at him to alert him that one of his paintings was up for auction for six figures. In reality, the work was a fake, but so convincing, the artist said, “I thought I was losing my mind.” Brushes with forgery like that one two decades ago, and concerns about his legacy and estate, prompted Fischl to appear in London to vouch for a new authentication system that would let artists sign their works with specks of synthetic DNA. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Copyright Registration Strategies
Copyright registration is something most artists can experiment without legal assistance and great cost, outside of more complex registration questions. However, this does not really help individual artists or small businesses who produce a lot of content. So let’s break it down and then you can make your own conclusions about how cheap and easy it is, depending on what type of content you are registering. (Read more from Clancco.)
On the Case: The Law on Augmented Reality and Museums
A few of our more tech-savvy museum clients have been exploring whether and how to make some of their exhibits come alive by using exciting new “augmented reality” technology. At the same time, they have been grappling with cutting-edge legal issues involved in this new technology—which is where we come in. (Read more from Artnet News.)
The Error of Margins: Vernacular Artists and the Mainstream Art World
Though the art world may not yet have a satisfactory way of referring to artists like Marlon Mullen, who are variously described by such leaky terms as self-taught, outsider, and vernacular, it has, over the past few years, shown more interest in them and is gradually growing the existing market for their work. (Read more from ARTnews.)
2016 Annual Conference Website Is Live
posted by Christopher Howard — October 08, 2015
The website for the 104th Annual Conference in Washington, DC, to be held from Wednesday, February 3 to Saturday, February 6, 2016, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, is live today. Get a taste of conference highlights and discover the benefits of registration, including access to all program sessions and admission to the Book and Trade Fair.
The dynamic energy of Washington, DC—known for its world-class museums and as an international destination for American history and culture—provides the backdrop for our annual gathering of more than four thousand artists, art historians, museum directors and curators, arts administrators, scholars, and educators. Look forward to the best in new scholarship, innovative art, and in-depth discussion of issues in the visual arts today.
Highlights of this year’s conference include the presentation of CAA’s 2016 Awards for Distinction, an opening reception at the Katzen Arts Center at American University, and the sixteenth annual Distinguished Scholar Session honoring Richard J. Powell of Duke University. The two Distinguished Artists’ Interviews will feature the sculptor Joyce Scott, speaking to the curator George Ciscle.
Among the highly anticipated sessions are: “South to North: Latin American Artists in the United States, 1820s–1890s,” chaired by Katherine E. Manthorne; “Transforming Japonisme: International Japonisme in an Age of Industrialization and Visual Commerce,” led by Gabriel P. Weisberg; and the two-part “Formalism before Clement Greenberg,” chaired by Katherine M. Kuenzli and Marnin Young. Other exciting session topics range from art as adventure to the Hudson River School, from digital cultural heritage to algorithms and data in contemporary art, and from diversity in curatorial work to staging design in museums.
Online registration for individuals and institutions is now open. In addition, you can book your hotel reservations and make your travel arrangements—don’t forget to use the exclusive CAA discount codes to save money! Register before the early deadline, December 21, 2015, to get the lowest rate and to ensure your place in the Directory of Attendees. You may also purchase tickets for special events and for a place in one of eleven professional-development workshops on a variety of topics for artists and scholars.
CAA will regularly update the conference website in the months leading up to the four-day event, so please be sure to check back often. Averaging more than 40,000 unique visitors per month, the conference website is the essential source for up-to-the-minute updates regarding registration, session listings, and hotel and travel discounts. Visit the Advertising section to learn more about reaching CAA membership and conference attendees.
We look forward to seeing you in Washington, DC!
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 07, 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.
US Has Funded Artists and Intellectuals for Half a Century, but It’s a Perennial Fight
As the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts celebrate their fiftieth anniversaries, they are still trying to climb out of the cellar, at least financially. While their endurance reflects an ongoing commitment to the arts and humanities, their struggles show that the government’s adherence to that promise can be fickle. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Does the Public Have a Right to Culture?
What do we mean when we say that artists and their heirs have a right to remuneration for the artist’s creativity? Conversely, what do we mean when we say that the public has a right to culture? Which public? Which culture? And is this “right” or “non-right” to be mediated solely through the law? (Read more from Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.)
Museum Directors Release Plan to Help Provide Safe Havens for Endangered Antiquities
Amid the wanton destruction of antiquities in Syria and elsewhere, the Association of Art Museum Directors, a group that represents museum directors, proposed a set of protocols to help cultural institutions understand how they can provide safe haven for valuable works of art and archaeological relics that are at risk of being damaged, destroyed, or looted. (Read more from the New York Times.)
The Informal Economy and the Global Art Market
It is difficult to imagine a reason to keep artworks in a free port unless there is speculation going on. If you are a collector of fine art, you want to be able to see and to appreciate what you own. But if you are a speculator, all you need is storage since you are betting that the work is going to increase in value. (Read more from SFAQ.)
Solving the Solvents
Solvents are used in oil painting for various reasons. In the first layers they are frequently meant to make the paint washier—often a necessary step in the painting process for some artists. With thinner and more fluid paint, one is able to sketch or conjure the gesture that breathes life into a blank canvas and informs the subsequent layers. (Read more from Just Paint.)
Why the Visual Artists Rights Act Is Failing
The federal Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), enacted in 1990 in the wake of the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc, was supposed to remedy a long series of conflicts between property owners and artists. The law grants artists the rights to prevent intentional modification to their art and the destruction of a work of “recognized stature.” But how effective is it? (Read more from Artsy.)
Humanities Majors’ Salaries
Major in English and expect to live with Mom and Dad for life. That’s the stereotype constantly reinforced by reports on the hot job prospects for nurses or code writers or various other positions for which practical training is seen as the route to economic success. But a new report shows that graduates with degrees in the humanities earn much more than the average for all American workers, challenging those who suggest that a degree in the humanities is a waste, at least financially. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
On the Academic Job Market, Does Patience Pay Off?
How long am I marketable? It’s one of the most difficult questions an academic job seeker can face. And it’s one of the most important questions we hope our Academic JobTracker project can help answer. If you don’t get a job in your first year on the market, should you stay the course and take another swing next hiring season? Or is it already time to explore other career options? (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 30, 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.
Am I a Hack or a Budding Genius?
I’m an undergraduate in painting and approaching my final semester. While I feel like I’ve come so far over the last several years, I can’t get over the fact that deep down, when I look at my pieces, they seem so derivative. Should I quit painting? What can I do to be more original? (Read more from Burnaway.)
What Is Transformative?
There has been a recent surge in interest around fair use both in academia and in the trenches of artistic production. Several books and articles have been written on the subject of late, not to mention the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts that CAA released in early 2015. These publications have provided an alternative to the “sky is falling” copyright narrative that Lawrence Lessig, James Boyle, and other legal scholars propagated in the late 1990s and early 2000s. (Read more from the Enemy.)
Will Facebook’s “Dislike” Button Change the Art World as We Know It?
Facebook will soon start testing a “dislike” button, or something very close to it. But will you really be able to dislike something? And what will the repercussions be for the hypersensitive contingency of contemporary art worlders? We decided to look at—you guessed it—Facebook to see what art types were saying about it. (Read more from the New York Observer.)
“So, What Is a Postdoc?”
After six years of graduate school, I got pretty good at explaining my research in evolutionary genetics to friends, family, strangers sitting beside me on an airplane, and anyone else who made the mistake of expressing an interest. What I didn’t anticipate was that when I finally finished my PhD, I would have to start explaining my actual job description. “I’m what’s called a ‘postdoc,’” I find myself saying regularly these days. And then I flounder. (Read more from Vitae.)
From Cory Arcangel to Pac-Man: How Digital Art Curators Save Vintage Data and Hardware
The artist Alexander Taylor was recently awarded a grant from Rhizome to support a project called .3gp. He plans to build a web app using YouTube’s API to let visitors digitally channel surf through a collection of videos shot on Motorola Razr–era cellphones. The project comes as the art world is increasingly concerned with preserving digital and electronic works, from amateur digital videos to experimental pieces by international art stars such as Cory Arcangel and Nam June Paik. (Read more from Fast Company.)
Not Paying Artists Deeply Entrenched in Gallery Culture, Research Suggests
The image of the hard-up artist toiling away day and night for little or no reward is nothing new, but recently published research may still surprise. It shows that more than 70 percent of contemporary visual artists who took part in publicly funded exhibitions in the last three years received no fee. Almost as many are now saying no to galleries because they cannot afford to work for free. The figures are published as part of a new campaign called Paying Artists, which is seeking a more equitable system. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Slow Teaching
At some point on the first day of classes I am going to ask my students to answer some questions anonymously. In all honesty, why did you enroll in this course? What final grade you would be happy with? What about this class are you most concerned or anxious about? Exploring students’ responses over the years has led me to identify two prevailing suspicions: that art-history courses are based on rote memorization of names and dates, and that class time will consist of a battery of artworks crammed into a swiftly delivered lecture. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Preventing Ethnic Fraud
Rachel Dolezal made headlines for claiming to be black even as her parents publicly insisted she was white. The case brought to light something that academe has dealt with for decades: faculty applicants claiming an ethnic affiliation they don’t actually possess, either to gain some kind of edge in the hiring process or to appear more expert in one’s field—or both. While a variety of ethnic and cultural groups have been the subject of such fraud, Native Americans might be the most consistently affected group. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)