CAA News Today
Survey about an Online Journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Art History
posted by Christopher Howard — July 02, 2015
ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org recently received a grant from The Kress Foundation to conduct preliminary research for an e-journal of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) in Art History that will launch in 2016.
We are writing to ask for your help with this initiative by completing a ten-minute survey before July 17.
AHTR is a peer-populated website, committed to experimentation, participation, and fostering community around teaching and learning in art history. The new e-journal Art History Pedagogy and Practice will build on this foundation to engage anyone interested in rigorous scholarship and quality content around pedagogical issues in art history.
This survey aims to identify stakeholders in this project and to make sure the e-journal responds to their needs. The survey will also help clarify the e-journal’s place within the existing landscape of SoTL, art history, and pedagogical research/practice, and help us better understand how a discipline-specific SoTL in art history might provide greater support for research around teaching and learning in the field.
We are distributing the survey to members of the art history and museum communities, but also seek input from university administrators, libraries, teaching/learning centers, academic technologists, and others involved in art history education. Please forward the survey to anyone you think would be willing to offer their feedback. We’re grateful for your time and theirs in helping shape what we hope will be a resource for many. We apologize for any cross-postings you may receive, but know the project will be strengthened by the broadest participation.
Click here to access the on-line survey.
(Survey participants will be eligible to win one of four $50 Amazon gift cards)
If you have questions or want more information about the e-journal initiative, we are in the process of creating an Art History Pedagogy and Practice page on the AHTR website. Immediate inquiries should be sent to teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
Virginia B. Spivey, Parme Giuntini, Renee McGarry
Project Leaders, Art History Pedagogy and Practice Initiative
Michelle Millar Fisher, Co-Founder and Dean, AHTR
Karen Shelby, Co-Founder and Dean, AHTR
Kathleen Wentrack, Contributing Editor, AHTR
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — July 01, 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.
Despite Fears about Trigger Warnings, Survey Suggests Few Faculty Are Forced to Use Them
Very few college professors are forced to use trigger warnings in class, according to an online survey of CAA and MLA members. Out of 808 who responded, less than 1 percent said their college or university had adopted a trigger-warning policy. Eighty-five percent said in the survey that students had never asked them to use trigger warnings, and 93 percent did not know of any student-initiated efforts at their school to require them in class. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
The Hostile Renegotiation of the Professor-Student Relationship
There is a scourge on college campuses today, driving a wedge between students and faculty. Political correctness? Maybe that, too. But I’m referring instead to the newly triumphant caricature of today’s undergrad (and perhaps some grad students as well) as a hypersensitive, helicoptered student-customer who will file a Title IX complaint if the dining hall kale isn’t organic. Today’s undergrad is so entitled as to demand to be employable after graduation. (Read more from the New Republic.)
Why State Lawmakers Must Support Tenure at Public Universities
Critics dismiss tenure as “a job for life.” Tenure, however, is not about protecting people but rather about protecting open conversation and debate. It is about academic freedom—the ability to research and teach on all topics, without fear of reprisal. Public universities, as state-chartered institutions, may be particularly prone to intervention when faculty members express politically unpopular ideas. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Fake Painting
Noah Charney, the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art and the author of the novel The Art Thief, spoke to the New Inquiry editor Malcolm Harris about his new book, The Art of Forgery. (Read more from the New Inquiry.)
Why Are There Still So Few Successful Female Artists?
What will it take to finally put an end to sexism in art? Things are a lot better than in the mid-1980s, when the Guerrilla Girls formed to picket a Museum of Modern Art survey that contained just 13 women in a show of 169 artists. But they are still not great: of all artists represented by galleries in the US today, just 30 percent are female, according to the stats from Micol Hebron’s Gallery Tally project. And that total seems to have been stuck more or less in place for some time. (Read more from Artnet News.)
How a New Librarian of Congress Could Improve US Copyright
The Librarian of Congress has a somewhat strange position. He or she both runs the world’s largest library—which has a staff in the thousands and a collection in the millions—and oversees the Copyright Office, the government office that manages the register of all copyrighted materials. So when the current Librarian of Congress, James Billington, announced plans to retire, it wasn’t only librarians who perked up. Copyright advocates did so too, because of the librarian’s incredible power. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Historian Uses Lasers to Unlock Mysteries of Gothic Cathedrals
Thirteen million people visit the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris every year, entering through massive wooden doors at the base of towers as solidly planted as mountains. They stand in front of walls filigreed with stained glass and gaze at a ceiling supported by delicate ribs of stone. If its beauty and magnificence is instantly apparent, so much about Notre Dame is not. To begin with, we don’t know who built this cathedral—or how. (Read more from National Geographic.)
A Realistic Summer Writing Schedule
The grueling grading period is over. The semester is finally finished. You’ve probably taken a few well-deserved weeks off, but now it’s time to start working on your own research and writing projects. Many of us use our precious summer “vacation” to churn out articles and book chapters. But as the tenure-track market tightens and pressure to publish increases, many people—especially junior faculty—feel intense anxiety over their summer writing schedules. (Read more from Vitae.)
Rebecca M. Brown Is the Next Editor-in-Chief of Art Journal
posted by Christopher Howard — June 26, 2015
On July 1, Rebecca M. Brown becomes the new editor-in-chief of Art Journal, CAA’s quarterly journal of modern and contemporary art. A scholar of colonial and post-1947 South Asian art and visual culture, Brown is associate professor of history of art at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She also chairs Hopkins’s Advanced Academic Program in Museum Studies. Brown succeeds Lane Relyea, associate professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who has led the journal since 2012.
In her nomination letter, Brown wrote, “In putting my name forward for editor, I am keenly aware that if I am selected my editorship would confirm a shift already well underway within the discipline—namely, the incorporation of questions related to global modern and contemporary art, transnational visual culture, and the machinations of art-making not solely in the northern Atlantic cities of Paris, London, and New York, but also in Lagos, Durban, Mexico City, Rio, Mumbai, Singapore, Beijing, Osaka, and Auckland. I believe the time has come for such a statement, but I also want to assert that in my own work I have been at pains to articulate a global modern that acknowledges the centrality of Europe and America as touchstones around the world. That is, rather than privilege such locations I suggest that thinking of the global modern as a set of distinct regional ‘modernisms’ is dishonest to the global interrelations of power that operate for artists around the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part of my own intellectual commitment is to bring the conversations happening around modernism in Asia, Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and the Pacific region together with those in Europe and North America in order to enhance scholarship and the production of both art and its history, wherever its local focus might be.”
Brown earned her PhD in South Asian and Islamic art history at the University of Minnesota in 1999, where she was a Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies and a CAORC research fellow. Her undergraduate degree is from Pomona College in Claremont, California. She has served as a consultant and a curator for modern and contemporary Indian art for the Peabody Essex Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation. She has led seminars in art history and museum studies at Georgetown University and George Washington University, and has lectured throughout North America and in Asia.
Brown has published her scholarship widely, notably in two books: Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (2010) and Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (2009). She wrote the exhibition catalogue for Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection (2011). She has also edited two publications with Deborah S. Hutton—A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture (2011) and Asian Art (2006)—and has written essays for Visual Anthropology, Res, Interventions, CSSAAME, Archives of Asian Art, Journal of Urban History, Screen, and Journal of Asian Studies.
Brown has performed the CAA journal trifecta: publishing in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, and caa.reviews. Her most recent contribution was “A Distant Contemporary: Indian Twentieth-Century Art in the US Festival of India (1985–86),” published in the September 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin. Previous to that, “P. T. Reddy, Neo-Tantrism, and Modern Indian Art” appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of Art Journal. Brown has written two book reviews and one exhibition review for caa.reviews over the years.
Before Johns Hopkins, Brown taught at Swansea University in Wales and the University of Redlands in California. She served as research associate for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and was a visiting scholar in history at Pennsylvania State University. She started her academic career as an assistant professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
In discussing her plans as editor, Brown writes, “It is crucial that Art Journal maintains its reputation as the top venue for the publication of articles and other kinds of engagements with modern and contemporary art, and as a space for artists to share their work and experiment in the context of a print journal. I would love to see artists taking advantage of the ‘analogue’ quality of the page and the journal format, perhaps in concert with filmic or other media shared via Art Journal Open.
“As a scholar situated often on the margin of the discipline—and recognizing that every scholar feels that way to some extent—I think of modern and contemporary art in wide scope: the entirety of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, certainly, and from anywhere around the world, including sites outside the usual urban metropolises. In addition, I’d like to seek out other kinds of unexplored spaces for art and for art history: pockets where, for example, medievalists might encounter contemporary mosaicists, or where temperature becomes a central element of art making, displaying, or writing. These engagements can happen in artist projects and scholarly articles or in more informal spaces within the pages of the journal, as exchanges, responses, object-studies, artist reflections, or conversations. In all of these areas, I am committed to maintaining the focus of Art Journal on artist projects that push boundaries and challenge norms and on scholarly, rigorously peer reviewed contributions to the field.”
Issues of Art Journal edited by Relyea will appear through Winter 2015. Brown’s first issue will be Spring 2016.
Images
First: Portrait of Rebecca M. Brown (photograph by J. Roffman)
Second: Rebecca M. Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — June 24, 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.
A Win for Academic Freedom: Steven Salaita Awarded Back-to-Back Victories against University That Fired Him
The first part of June has awarded back-to-back victories to Steven Salaita, a professor who last year was dismissed from his post at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for posting tweets considered by some to be beyond the pale of proper academic discourse. What makes this case especially interesting—and what the recent court decision and a critical vote by the largest confederation of US professors in the country shows—is the undue and improper interference of wealthy donors on the internal affairs of public educational institutions. (Read more from Salon.)
Should I Ask Someone to Write about My Show?
I’ve had two solo shows in the last couple of years that received absolutely no press coverage. I’m trying to get a better position at the college at which I currently teach and need all the help I can get. Reviews look good on a résumé. Should I ask some of the local writers to write about my next show? What if they are good friends? (Read more from Burnaway.)
Help Desk: Serious Damage
I have my work up in a solo exhibition at a well-known arts center in a large city. Last weekend during open gallery hours, I walked in to find five wall pieces and a major floor sculpture missing. The attendants had no idea what had happened or where the work was. Finally, I found someone who let me in to the offices where the work was being stored. Two pieces were broken and the rest were undamaged. How should I handle this situation? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Blurring the Museum-Gallery Divide
Ever since Mark Rosenthal left his job as head of twentieth-century art at the National Gallery in Washington to become an independent curator, museums around the country have sought his talents. Now art galleries are trying to hire him, too—but not just for his scholarship. “There was a big expectation,” Rosenthal said, “that I could deliver works for sale.” (Read more from the New York Times.)
You Want to Write for a Popular Audience? Really?
At a recent job interview, I explained to the committee that I was trying to write a book for a popular audience. One of them smirked, but at least had the grace to try to hide it behind her hand. The self-described maverick of the team simply laughed out loud. The head of the committee stared at me in genuine amazement. “Why bother?” he asked. After all, there was no hope of reaching the general public. Or as he put it, “the masses will always just be the masses.” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
World’s Most Inaccessible Art Found in the Heart of the Colombian Jungle
A British wildlife filmmaker has returned from one of the most inaccessible parts of the world with extraordinary footage of ancient rock art that has never been filmed or photographed before. In an area of Colombia so vast and remote that contact has still not been made with some tribes thought to live there, Mike Slee used a helicopter to film hundreds of paintings depicting hunters and animals believed to have been created thousands of years ago. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Arts Philanthropy Booming, Cultural Giving Rises 9.2 Percent, New Study Says
Americans’ donations to arts and culture rose 9.2 percent in 2014, the highest increase in nine categories tracked by Giving USA, an annual report on charitable contributions. Overall, however, arts and culture commanded a modest share of the philanthropic pie. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
How to Use Student Evaluations Wisely
I’m well aware that the value of student evaluations is contested, but like my father, I’ve also found that they can be useful tools. At my own institution, I inherited a nuanced set of faculty-designed guidelines on the use of student evaluations. Among the best ideas I found in them. (Read more from Vitae.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — June 17, 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.
Why Should Collectors Get All the Breaks?
Many of America’s major museums have benefitted from laws that afford collectors tax breaks when donating works to institutions or charities, and now artists and their advocates are seeking similar compensation for works they gift. While collectors can write off the fair market value of works they donate to museums, artists can only claim for the costs of the materials they used to produce the work. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
After the Riots, Baltimore’s Best Shot at Redemption May Be Its Arts Community
On the April day when Freddie Gray died from injuries he suffered in police custody and a week before rioters took to the streets in protest, Karen Brooks Hopkins, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, gave a presentation to a small group of Baltimoreans about the future of their city. The symposium, in a state-of-the-art auditorium little more than a mile down North Avenue from the blighted block where Gray was arrested, centered on a question that has sparked revitalization efforts from Detroit to Dublin and from Miami to Marseille: whether arts can turn a city around. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Dear Liberal Professor, Students Aren’t The Problem
In a recent Vox essay, a self-described “liberal professor,” writing under a pseudonym, explained how students had changed over his nine years in the college classroom. His liberal students now “terrify” him, he wrote, with their identity politics and imagined grievances. Here we go, I thought, another lament of the loss of white-male privilege, this time set at the university. What I quickly realized, however, was that the essay might be better characterized as a jeremiad, a cautionary tale that exaggerates current woes to elicit social change. (Read more from Vitae.)
The Art of Having Difficult Conversations
The ability to have difficult conversations is important for career success, productivity, and relationships in almost every field, and higher education is no exception. However, despite the need to have these conversations, the idea of addressing sensitive issues can be scary. This article provides strategies for having difficult conversations and gives example scripts. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Ford Shifts Grant Making to Focus Entirely on Inequality
The fight against inequality will take center stage at the Ford Foundation under a sweeping overhaul announced today by the nation’s second biggest philanthropy. Not only will Ford direct all of its money and influence to curbing financial, racial, gender, and other inequities, but it will give lots more money in a way grantees have been clamoring for: It hopes to double the total it gives in the form of unrestricted grants for operating support. (Read more from the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
MoMA.org Turns 20: Archiving Two Decades of Exhibition Sites
It’s hard to believe that MoMA’s website, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in May, is older than Google. It began with two relatively simple (by today’s standards) HTML exhibition sites for the Mutant Materials and Video Spaces exhibitions in 1995. Since then, over two hundred exhibition sites have been created, documenting not only the museum’s evolving curatorial interests, but also huge changes in web coding and design. This collection of exhibition sites almost serves as its own online museum of the internet. (Read more from Inside/Out.)
Dying of Exposure
At some point, two years ago, maybe, I stopped doing things for free: no free writing, no free talks, no free critiques with artists or art students, nothing. I didn’t make the decision out of avarice; I made it as a matter of survival. I used to accept all kinds of invitations to do such things, paid or not, when I was a tenured professor. I used to feel that it was sort of crass to think about my economic needs when there were important intellectual ideas to discuss. But, of course, the privilege of not having to think about my intellectual labor in those terms was predicated on the very fact that I was being paid, by my university, if not by the publishers, colleges, students, or artists who hosted the events to which I was invited. (Read more from Art Practical.)
How to Tailor Your Online Image
You should have a curated Internet presence for the job market. The fact is, you will be Googled. That is not usually because search committees are trying to dig up dirt on you, or derail your candidacy. Rather, they just want to know more about you, and get a sense of your intellectual communities, of where and how you are active, and of your “style” of communication (lively, reserved, direct, blunt, tactful, supportive, combative, and so on). (Read more from Vitae.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — June 10, 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.
I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me
I’m a professor at a midsize state school. I have been teaching college classes for nine years now. I have won (minor) teaching awards, studied pedagogy extensively, and almost always score highly on my student evaluations. Yet things have changed since I started teaching. The vibe is different. I wish there were a less blunt way to put this, but my students sometimes scare me—particularly the liberal ones. (Read more from Vox.)
Stolen Art? Why No One Can Say for Sure
The largest and most powerful due-diligence service used by the art world is at the center of three separate provenance disputes, two of which are working their way through international courts. The Art Loss Register, a company that works with law-enforcement officials worldwide, more than eighty auction houses, most major art fairs, and innumerable collectors and dealers, has provided certificates confirming that works of art were free from claim, when they were in fact subject to claims by third parties or stolen. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
How Adjuncts Want to Be Hired
How should adjuncts be hired? What are the best practices? And is the method by which they are hired any indication of how they will be treated on the job? Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth think so. In their new book, The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments, Bérubé and Ruth call for professionalizing contingent hiring, among other things. (Read more from Vitae.)
The Degree for Quitters and Failures
Today’s arguments about alternative academic careers almost always center on PhDs. Should we train PhDs for nonfaculty jobs? Some say that we already have a credential for people who don’t want a full-blown scholarly PhD—it’s called a master’s degree. Instead of reforming the PhD to make it more relevant to different career choices, this argument goes, we should just direct undecided graduate students into master’s programs. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
NEH, Mellon Foundation’s Humanities Open Book Program to Revive Backlist Work
As part of a wider emphasis on digital publishing and the relevance of humanities scholarship, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities are giving new life to out-of-print humanities books. In January the two organizations announced a new joint pilot grant program, Humanities Open Book, which will help publishers identify important works, secure rights to them, and convert them to EPUB-format ebooks freely accessible under a Creative Commons license. (Read more from Library Journal.)
Take Note
Can college students text and tweet their way to a better grade? In “Mobile Phones in the Classroom: Examining the Effects of Texting, Twitter, and Message Content on Student Learning,” Jeffrey H. Kuznekoff of Miami University explores if texting, tweeting, and note taking can be combined. The article appears in the most recent edition of Communication Education, a journal of the National Communication Association. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Cliché and a Lack of Feeling: Richard Shiff Explains Why Critics Have Failed Painting
Repetition and cliché infect art criticism. The art historian Thierry de Duve noted an irony in 2003: “About once every five years, the death of painting is announced, invariably followed by the news of its resurrection.” Like history, criticism is subject to optics—that is, perspective. Critics once opposed photography to painting, as if the two media were representative of antithetical psychologies, and social orders. This perspective lies within the penumbra of Walter Benjamin, who associated painting with focused concentration and photography and film with disruptive distraction. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Losing the Thread
Textiles are technology, more ancient than bronze and as contemporary as nanowires. We hairless apes coevolved with our apparel. But, to reverse Arthur C. Clarke’s adage, any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature. It seems intuitive, obvious—so woven into the fabric of our lives that we take it for granted. (Read more from Aeon.)
The Getty Foundation to Fund a Fifth Year of the College Art Association-Getty International Program
posted by Christopher Howard — June 09, 2015
The Getty Foundation has awarded the College Art Association a grant to fund the CAA-Getty International Program for the fifth consecutive year. The Foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring fifteen international visual-arts professionals to the 104th Annual Conference, taking place February 3–6, 2016, in Washington DC. The CAA-Getty International Program provides funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships to art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators. The program will include a one-day preconference colloquium on international issues in art history on February 2, at which participants will present and discuss their common professional interests and issues.
The goals of the International Program are to increase international participation in CAA, to diversify the organization’s membership, and to foster collaborations between American art historians, artists, and curators and their international colleagues. CAA also strives to familiarize international participants with the submission process for conference sessions to encourage ongoing involvement with the association. CAA will provide hosts from its membership to welcome the international participants and introduce them to colleagues in their fields.
Historically, the majority of international registrants to CAA’s Annual Conferences have come from North America, the United Kingdom, and Western European countries. In the first four years of the CAA-Getty International Program, CAA has added seventy-five attendees from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, Caribbean countries, and South America. As this alumni group grows, so too does international participation in CAA. Former grant recipients have become ambassadors of CAA in their countries, sharing knowledge gained at the Annual Conference with their colleagues and encouraging them to submit applications to the International Program. A number of scholarly collaborations have also ensued among grant recipients and CAA members. The value of attending a CAA Annual Conference as a participant in the CAA-Getty International Program was succinctly summarized by Nazar Kozak, a 2015 participant from Ukraine: “To put it simply, I understood that I can become part of a global scholarly community. I felt like I belong here.”
The deadline for applications has been extended to August 26, 2015. Grant guidelines and the 2016 application can be found here.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — June 03, 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.
IIE Launches Program to Assist Threatened Artists
The Institute of International Education will soon launch a program to save the lives and work of artists who face persecution in their home countries. The new Artist Protection Fund, a three-year pilot program supported by a $2.79 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will make life-saving fellowship grants to threatened artists from any field of artistic endeavor and place them at host universities and arts centers in countries where they can safely continue their work and plan for their future. (Read more from the Institute of International Education.)
Protecting Priceless Art from Natural Disasters
The reviews of the new design of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York have been glowing. But the most intriguing feature might be one that’s gone largely unnoticed: its custom flood-mitigation system, which was designed halfway through the museum’s construction, in the aftermath of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, when more than five million gallons of water flooded the site. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes
Despite encouraging signs of women’s improved status and visibility in the art world, there are still major systemic problems. Do not misunderstand me: women artists are in a far better position today than they were forty-five years ago, when Linda Nochlin wrote her landmark essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Access to “high art” education, to which women have historically been denied, is now possible for many with financial means. Moreover, the institutional power structures that Nochlin argued made it “impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius,” have been shifting. (Read more from ARTnews.)
62 Women Share Their Secrets to Art World Success: Part One
What are the secrets to a successful career in the art world? Artnet News asked sixty-two women in the upper echelons of museums, galleries, art public-relations firms, and art nonprofits to tell us what they’ve learned over the course of their careers, and to offer their advice for women looking to break into the business. (Read more from Artnet News.)
62 Women Share Their Secrets to Art World Success: Part Two
What are the secrets to a successful career in the art world? Artnet News asked sixty-two women in the upper echelons of museums, galleries, art public-relations firms, and art nonprofits to tell us what they’ve learned over the course of their careers, and to offer their advice for women looking to break into the business. (Read more from Artnet News.)
The Rise of the Private Art “Museum”
In the heart of Berlin stands a windowless concrete bunker so awesomely ugly that, when you see it, you instinctively avert your gaze. It is heavy, gray, and shrapnel-pocked, and has no signage to explain its protean history. Designed by the Nazi architect Karl Bonatz, the bunker was built in 1942 as an air-raid shelter for Germans. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the building was appropriated for use first as an avant-garde performance space and later as a techno club. In 2003, Christian and Karen Boros bought the building to display a portion of their sizable collection of contemporary art. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Looking for Creativity in Brains Will Take More Creativity
About a decade and a half ago, the neuroscience world got super stoked about a sexy new way to look at living brains: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Now, fMRI is still a great tool—just as long as you’re applying it to questions that it can actually answer. The problem is, many questions that can be answered simply with fMRI data have, by virtue of being simple, already been answered. That means any successive studies done with fMRI have to meet a much, much higher bar. (Read more from Wired.)
Digitally Divided
There’s nothing like being without the internet for a few days to realize how much I don’t miss it, at least occasionally. But it also makes me realize how much I assume when I have regular access. I’ve been vacationing in parts of the country where our cell phones can’t reach a signal. It’s a good time to relax, listen to the wind in the trees, take long walks with no particular destination in mind, but you can’t pick up the latest news, keep your email clutter cut down to size, or check tomorrow’s weather, all things that I take for granted normally. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Spring 2015 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — June 01, 2015
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of ten 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 ten Meiss grantees for spring 2015 are:
- Marisa Anne Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, Princeton University Press
- George Bent, Public Painting and Visual Culture in Early Republican Florence, Cambridge University Press
- Sarah Gordon, Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes, Yale University Press
- Anne Helmreich, Art and Science: The Quest for Truth to Nature in British Photography and Painting, 1839–1914, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Jeehee Hong, Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400, University of Hawai‘i Press
- Dorothy Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones: Craftsmen and Scholars in Early Qing China, University of Washington Press
- Catha Paquette, At the Crossroads: Patronage and Censorship of Diego Rivera in the 1930s, University of Texas Press
- Eric Ramírez-Weaver, Saving Science: Capturing the Heavens in Carolingian Manuscripts, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Oscar E. Vázquez, The End Again: Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Robert Williams, Raphael and the Modernity of Italian Renaissance Art, Cambridge University 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.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 27, 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.
Does Color Even Exist?
Color perception is an ancient and active philosophical problem. It’s an instance of the wider category of sensory perception, but since the color spectrum fits on a single line, it has always been of particular interest. In her new book Outside Color, M. Chirimuuta gives a serendipitously timed history of the puzzle of color in philosophy. To read Outside Color as a layman feels like being let in on a shocking secret: neither scientists nor philosophers know for sure what color is. (Read more from the New Republic.)
Help Desk: Support for Artists
I espouse fair-labor initiatives such as W.A.G.E. to pay artists. However, my own projects are often un- or underfunded; if a stipend covers a significant portion of my expenses, that seems like a success, even if I take a loss on my own time and labor. As a consequence I’m unable to pay myself, much less my collaborators, contributors, and volunteers. How do I navigate this paradox? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
A Few Good Reasons to Drop Out of Art School
Earlier this month, the first-year students in the MFA program in visual art at the University of Southern California announced that they were all dropping out. It was also a brave gesture—not heroic, but one made at a personal cost and resonant with the larger situation in art right now. The MFA is not only a prerequisite for teaching art but a marker of professional seriousness in the art world: if you want to get your work into the Whitney Biennial, so the conventional wisdom goes, you’re going to need a degree. Abandoning one on principle is no small thing. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Arts Management: An Exposé and Guide
Are you tired? Rundown? Listless? Do you constantly meet the diversity quota in meetings? Well, if you answered, “yes” to these questions, you are not alone. I, too, suffer from only-one syndrome. I, too, am the person that everyone turns to when a question arises about “outreach” to people of color. As a student, intern, and employee in the field of arts administration, I have a desire to change my answers to “no,” which has sparked my commitment to promoting systemic change in performing arts organizations through racial and ethnic diversity management and engagement. (Read more from HowlRound.)
Why We Should Let the Pantheon Crack
John Ochsendorf wants to tear down Rome’s iconic Pantheon. He wants to pull apart its two-thousand-year-old walls until its gorgeous dome collapses. Destroying it, he believes, is the best way to preserve it. But the Pantheon that Ochsendorf, a professor of engineering and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has in mind to destroy is less than 20 inches high, and it’s made of 492 three-dimensionally-printed blocks. (Read more from Nautilus.)
This Is What Happens When You Slash Funding for Public Universities
On February 25, three University of Arizona graduate students had a meeting with Kelli Ward, a Republican state senator. They were lobbying against massive new cuts to state spending on higher education; the number being thrown around was $75 million. Under the state constitution, attending the university is supposed to be as “nearly free as possible,” but due to state budget cuts, tuition had increased more than 70 percent between 2008 and 2013 for in-state students—the severest hike in the country. (Read more from the Nation.)
Do Touch the Artwork at Prado’s Exhibit for the Blind
It’s a warning sign at art museums around the world: “Don’t touch the artwork.” But Spain’s famous Prado Museum is changing that, with an exhibit where visitors are not only allowed to touch the paintings—they’re encouraged to do so. The Prado has made three-dimensional copies of some of the most renowned works in its collection—including those by Goya, Velázquez, and El Greco—to allow blind people to feel them. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
I Know What You Need to Do This Summer
What should you do over the summer to prepare for the academic job market in the fall? In the next few months, you should aim to solidify all of the elements of your record that you can. That includes your dissertation if you are still ABD, as well as your publications, teaching, conferences, and references. Perhaps you might even do some initial research toward new projects. (Read more from Vitae.)