CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — April 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.
Why Experts Are the Last People You Want to Include in Creative Brainstorming
In a team setting, certain kinds of experts often wield power over the rest of the group, setting an example for junior teammates to follow. Ironically, these same experts often lose their ability to think up and weigh the wildly creative solutions that can lead to team breakthroughs. Smart beginners resent them for that. (Read more from Fast Company.)
The Long, Twisted History of Glitch Art
Nick Briz, a Chicago-based artist, educator, and organizer, has defined “glitch” as “an unexpected moment in a system that calls attention to that system, and perhaps even leads us to notice aspects of that system that might otherwise go unnoticed. Glitch art, then, is anytime an artist intentionally leverages that moment, by either recontextualizing or provoking glitches.” The glitch draws back the curtain on our sleekest devices and virtual constructs to reveal raw pixels and code, a surreal landscape of unformed possibilities. (Read more from the Kernel.)
Am I an Activist?
A few months ago, I was on a conference panel about activism at the junior faculty level. Apparently when you ask people about activism in my field of religious studies, my name pops up, which baffles me. Am I an activist? I wouldn’t give myself that label. (Read more from Vitae.)
Just How Important Is Color?
When was the last time you thought about color? Save for the occasional breathtaking sunset, or “The Dress” phenomenon last month, how often do you consciously stop and think about the specific shades of the world around you? Unless you’re a fashion designer, painter, or an interior decorator, it’s probably something you take for granted. A recent video by Valspar Paint highlights just how awe-inspiring color really is. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
Rights to Scholarly Work
For many years, Ohio State University had an understanding with its faculty: the institution might claim intellectual-property rights to innovations, inventions, and patentable research, but scholarly works belonged to professors alone. Now a new draft intellectual-property policy is threatening that agreement in the eyes of some faculty members. The ongoing debate has implications for defining scholarly work in the digital age and for just how much of an academic’s work—digital or not—his or her institution can claim to own. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Precious Art Analyzed without Damage Using New Laser Technique
Precious works of art in need of preservation or authentication could in future be studied using a new laser technique, developed by a collaboration of British and Italian scientists, that can analyze layers of paint without causing any damage to the object itself. This new technique will be of real benefit to curators of cultural heritage who need to preserve and authenticate precious works of art without harming them. (Read more from Phys.org.)
O Adjunct! My Adjunct!
I spent half of my undergraduate career figuring out what I didn’t want to do. I started off in the journalism program, switched to literature, was undecided for a few panicked, free-floating months, and studied photography for a time. But the spring of my sophomore year, I enrolled in a fiction-writing workshop with an instructor named Harvey Grossinger. What I didn’t know at the time—and what I wouldn’t figure out for the better part of the next decade—was that Harvey was an adjunct. He didn’t tell us, and I didn’t know to ask. As an undergraduate, I never heard the term. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Lip-Syncing to the Academic Conversation
From the moment they begin doing research, scholars are told to connect their work to “the conversation.” They should stay on top of scholarship in their field, responding to the critiques of their contemporaries as well as the dogma of their disciplines. But what happens when that conversation takes place behind a pay wall through which you cannot afford to pass? What happens when your work ignites a dialogue that you can no longer follow? (Read more from Vitae.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 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.
Median Salaries of Tenured and Tenure-Track Professors at Four-Year Colleges, 2014–15
The median base salaries of tenured and tenure-track professors at four-year colleges increased by 2 percent in 2014—a rate of salary growth that was down a tenth of a percent from the previous year, according to the results of an annual survey from the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Help Desk: Put the Artist First
In the role of writer and curator, I find myself playing bureaucratic middleman between artists and the public, or between artists and institutions. When I get an idea for an exhibition or written feature, the appropriate order of things often gets confusing for me. Should I first approach the artists with the idea, to make sure they are willing and able to participate, or should I discuss the project with the institution or publication, to be sure it gets green-lit? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Museums Turn to Technology to Boost Attendance by Millennials
Art museum attendance dipped 5 percent from 2002 to 2012, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. Museumgoers 75 and older were the only age group to increase over that period. The guardians of posterity must be concerned about the future, no matter how long the lines may be. Curators worry most about millennials. How do static galleries of canvas and artifact engage a generation raised on the reactive pleasures of right swipes and hyperlinks? How do you sell Goya when Game of Thrones is a click away? (Read more from the New York Times.)
Taking Note: More Resources for Arts Data-Miners
The nation’s museums and libraries are taking prodigious steps to bring their most prized collections of artistic and cultural heritage online. But what about the data concerning those institutions? If we increasingly have the chance to view a painting, piece of sculpture, or rare manuscript from any location, then how easy is it to access basic stats about those items, to run them through analysis without cumbersome software, and to create visualizations that can be shared on multiple platforms? (Read more from the National Endowment for the Arts.)
Dimensions: Expanded Measures of Textiles
The contributions to this issue of Art Practical explore making and process in several ways—through elemental fibers, woven structures, and cloth’s capacity to hold color. Sonya Clark employs the most elemental of fibers—hair—in her essay, while Rebecca Gates’s exploratory text reveals how certain artists employ the warp and weft of a woven textile to create works that are simultaneously aural and visual experiences. (Read more from Art Practical.)
Museums Unite in Campaign to Save Massive Land Art Project
American museums—including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and the Walker Art Center—are campaigning for the conservation of Basin and Range, the stretch of the land surrounding Michael Heizer’s City. Michael Govan, director of LACMA, said, “The extraordinary Basin and Range landscape by itself is worth protecting. Michael Heizer’s art must be protected too. Together, the environment and the artwork comprise one of the nation’s greatest natural and artistic treasures.” (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
A Report on AP Art History (Part I)
The College Board has released a significant revision of the curriculum for Advanced Placement (AP) Art History that goes into effect in 2015–16. This presents the opportunity to encourage greater exchange between secondary and university educators who have developed innovative teaching methods that can be effective at any level of art-historical study. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
How to Improve the Job Search Process, from the Perspective of a Candidate
Job openings are both a blessing and a curse. Search committees spend their time and energy reading through applications, selecting candidates, and making choices. But, no matter the stress that current faculty members are under, the applicants are under more. Each of us applicants is applying for dozens of jobs, possibly year after year. (Read more from Tenure, She Wrote.)
Institute of Fine Arts Publishes Report on Trends in Graduate Education
posted by Christopher Howard — March 24, 2015
Patricia Rubin is Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University.
In 2010, thanks to a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Fine Art at New York University inaugurated the Mellon Research Initiative. The initiative’s aim was to investigate trends in graduate education and advanced research in art history, archaeology, and conservation. That investigation took place at a time when those fields faced considerable challenges—financial, institutional, and conceptual. Cutbacks in funding from all sources and the concomitant or resulting instrumentalization of university education, which favors economic rationales for degree structures, department sizes, and disciplinary evaluation, presented explicit challenges to the humanistic as opposed to the “hard” sciences. They continue to do so.
The resulting publication, Pathways to the Future: Trends in Graduate Education, was introduced and discussed during three panels at CAA’s Annual Conference in February under the rubric of “Field/Work: Object and Site.” The Pathways report is the result of four years of consultation, undertaken through a series of workshops, conferences, and committees in which our fieldworkers—graduate students, professors, publishers, and university administrators, among others—were asked about the directions being taken in art history, archaeology, and conservation. These participants considered the resources those fields require to support graduate training and research; how those resources are most meaningfully allocated; and, crucially, how learning is best delivered in curriculum and training programs.
The public workshops and conferences (now available on the institute’s video archive) were accompanied by the work of three committees convened to pose relevant questions and investigate different aspects of our practices as researchers and educators. Unified in aim, the review committees largely operated independently. They shaped their work according to concerns and protocols specific to each field. The form of their reporting varies accordingly. All three committees considered both present conditions and future possibilities.
The examination of the state of our subjects found them to be generally robust. If anything they are stronger than ever before, existing as they do in today’s image-based environment and able to promote critical seeing along with critical thinking. They are inherently interdisciplinary and equally international or global in their inquiry and potential impact. They have direct relation to material understanding, in the recovery and safeguarding of our physical heritage, in interpreting its present condition, and in forecasting future manifestations.
Although based on wide consultation and meticulous deliberation, this report is intended to contribute to vital and ongoing conversations about the disciplines of art history, archaeology, and conservation, about their professional and intellectual situation, and about strengths, weaknesses, and strategies. Their thoughts on those matters are contained in this document, which is available on the institute’s website for downloading and circulating. The institute hopes this document generates discussion and stimulates further thoughts on the topics it raises and regarding training and research in art history, archaeology, and conservation.
The institute is profoundly grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its generous sponsorship, and to all those who participated in the initiative.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 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.
Welcome to the Brave New World of the Corporate-Sponsored Artist
It has never been easy for writers and artists to pursue their craft: art takes time and does not, in most cases, result in much monetary payoff. Since the 1900s, nonprofit organizations have filled this role with residency programs that are usually funded by wealthy donors or public donations. The Alliance of Artists Communities tracks these programs: there are currently over two hundred in the United States. But over the last couple of years, a new variety of artist-in-residence program has entered the scene, this time sponsored by big companies. (Read more from Fast Company.)
A Real Estate Investment Cooperative for NYC
In 2008, some friends and I built out and managed a studio space in New York. We signed a five-year lease (with a three-year option) and hoped for the best. Most of us got involved to save money, but quickly the space became an emotional intellectual home. When I realized that we would pay our landlord $960,000 over eight years for a dilapidated 8,000-square-foot studio space, I became obsessed with affordable, equitable ownership models. (Read more from Medium.)
A Palette of Textures
We become painters at some deep level not out of a love of images—after all, there are many ways to create those. Instead, at some point, we fall in love with the very stuff of our chosen medium. And if that happens to be oils, then our love is with the silky, dense, slippery, and intractable mud we spend our lives trying to master. (Read more from Just Paint.)
The Near and Far Future of Libraries
Recently, Google vice president Vint Cerf warned that we might be headed for a digital dark age, a massive loss of information with obsolete file types and hardware. That’s an especially dire prophecy in an era when digitization is rapidly eclipsing print media, artificial intelligence is perfecting search queries, and drastic upheavals are quietly underfoot at the world’s historic libraries. All this leads to the question of what happens if we lose our traditional libraries? (Read more from Hopes and Fears.)
In the Memory Ward
At first, the library of the Warburg Institute, in London, seems and smells like any other university library: four floors of fluorescent lights and steel shelves, with the damp, weedy aroma of aging books everywhere, and sudden apparitions of graduate students wearing that look, at once brightly keen and infinitely discouraged, eternally shared by graduate students, whether the old kind, with suede elbow patches, or the new kind, with many piercings. Only as the visitor begins to study the collections does the oddity of the place appear. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Global Audiences, Zero Visitors: How to Measure the Success of Museums’ Online Publishing
Fifty percent of arts organizations in the United States maintain a blog. The Metropolitan Museum of Art calculated that while it draws six million visitors in a year, its website attracts 29 million users and its Facebook page reaches 92 million. Yet only a small percentage of these online visitors would ever walk up the New York museum’s famous steps. If the internet has changed the definition of what a museum’s audience is, then it also poses the difficult question of how to interact with it. (Read more from Rhizome.)
Spare Us the So-Called Experts and Call for the Connoisseurs
In the quest for academic impartiality, we often ignore actual ability. True attributional expertise—let us be grown up and call it connoisseurship—can only be gained through years of experience. It requires intense scrutiny of paintings by all manner of artists, of all levels of quality, and of pictures in varying conditions. Although there is a certain element of natural talent in connoisseurship, there is no substitute for training your “eye” over time. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Teaching Art History and Race: Bridging Gaps in the Global Survey Course
Designed to explore art from prehistory through the present, the current global survey course is often problematic. Many popular textbooks analyze art in the Western world extensively and chronologically while reviewing thousands of years of non-Western art history geographically in single chapters. This imbalance avoids addressing important issues including gender and race. In 2014, the murders of Eric Gardner and Michael Brown brought similar concerns in our society to light. These events provoked us to engage our art-history survey students about the relationship of art and race, and how that interaction calls attention to the inherent inequalities in our own field. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
March 2015 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — March 16, 2015
The opening essay of the March 2015 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is “The Fine Art of Being Indigenous” by the Tuscarora photographer Richard W. Hill Sr., the latest in the “Whither Art History?” series.
In other essays in the issue, Sheri Francis Shaneyfelt analyzes collaborations among the five painters of the Società del 1496 workshop in relation to the art market of Perugia. Next, Mark Rosen considers the portraitlike representation of slaves in Pietro Tacca’s Quattro Mori in Livorno in view of contemporary social conditions—including the slave trade—in seventeenth-century Tuscany. Matthew C. Hunter wrote “Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s” to situate the artist’s use of unstable and unconventional materials within late-eighteenth-century cultural practices. Finally, Susan L. Siegfried investigates the classical ideal and fashion in post-Revolutionary France as sources for Marie-Denis Viller’s A Study of a Woman after Nature.
In the Reviews section, Robert J. Wallis considers Peter S. Wells’s How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Visions, Patterns, and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times, and Todd Cronan analyzes a translation of Henri Matisse and Pierre Courthion’s Chatting with Henri Matisse: The Lost 1941 Interview. A recent exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Italian Futurism 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, is assessed by Anthony White, and Jennifer A. Greenhill reviews Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art by Gregory H. Williams.
CAA sends print copies of The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members regardless of their subscription choice.
In the next issue of the quarterly journal, to be published in June 2015, essays will consider the physical and textual evidence in the construction history of the basilica of S. Lorenzo in Florence, Anthony van Dyck’s paintings of Saint Sebastian, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s images of lapdogs as evidence of an Enlightenment shift in attitudes about animals, and the largely unrecognized modern type of the gawker in Félix Vallotton’s prints and his novel, The Murderous Life.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 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 Benefits of No-Tech Note Taking
The moment of truth for me came in the spring 2013 semester. I looked out at my visual-communication class and saw a group of six students transfixed by the blue glow of a video on one of their computers, and decided I was done allowing laptops in my large lecture class. “Done” might be putting it mildly. Although I am an engaging lecturer, I could not compete with Facebook and YouTube, and I was tired of trying. The next semester I told students they would have to take notes on paper. Period. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Net Neutrality and the Arts
Last month, the Federal Communications Commission approved new rules for enforcing net neutrality. Independent agency rulemaking might sound like a sleepy topic, but over 4 million people—a record-setting number—sent in comments. What does the rule mean for artists and arts organizations? (Read more from ARTSblog.)
The Forgotten Masterpieces of African Modernism
In the 1960s and 1970s, countries across Africa celebrated their independence with astonishingly avant-garde architecture. Oliver Wainwright reports on a fascinating attempt to chronicle this forgotten history. (Read more from the Guardian.)
$5,200 or $5.2 Million? It’s All in How It’s Framed
When Lady Hambleden moved from her stately manor to a cottage in a village outside London, she had little room, and even less desire, for the Aubusson carpets, Louis XV chairs, Regency girandoles, and lesser English paintings that populated her estate. So, in 2013, she held a kind of Downton Abbey tag sale at Christie’s in London. Among the three-hundred-plus items she put up for auction was an oil sketch that copied Salisbury Cathedral From the Meadows, one of the best-known works of the great nineteenth-century English landscape painter John Constable. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Alt-Ac or Bust
The busy season of tenure-track hiring is winding down, and those many candidates who were unsuccessful on that front are now waiting for the visiting professorships and postdoctoral fellowships to shuffle through the rotation. They’re also pondering their nonfaculty options. (Read more from Vitae.)
Why Has the Scholarly Journal Endured?
Last week marked the 350th anniversary of the first publication of a scholarly journal: Philosophical Transactions, edited by Henry Oldenburg and published, then as now, by the Royal Society. This publication “pioneered the concepts of scientific priority and peer review which, together with archiving and dissemination, provide the model for almost 30,000 scientific journals today.” Given how much change is happening in the world of scholarly communication, we wondered: Why has the journal endured as a form of scholarly communication, and will it continue to thrive? (Read more from Exchanges.)
Study Discovers Power of Art Making on Mood
For people who work with textiles to create art, whether it’s knitting, quiltmaking, or needlework, it is likely no surprise that the activities aid in relaxation and improve mood. Ann Collier, assistant processor of psychological sciences, has first-hand experience with the phenomenon and the research to explain it. After having three children in about a year, Collier turned to making textiles as a means of coping. “It was the only relief I had, the only part of my life where I could finish something beautiful and have control,” Collier said. (Read more from Phys.Org.)
Navigating the Academic Conference with Social Anxiety
Academic conferences can be one of the most enjoyable experiences that you can have during graduate school. A paid-for trip, usually somewhere at least semiexotic, to allow you to talk about the kind of work that you are personally interested in—what’s not to like about that? Well, for those of us who deal with anxiety in unfamiliar situations, attending an academic conference alone in a strange place without knowing anyone can be a difficult and demanding experience. (Read more from GradHacker.)
2015 Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant Winners
posted by Christopher Howard — March 10, 2015
CAA is pleased to announce the 2015 recipients of the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant. This award program provides financial support for the publication of book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art and is made possible by a generous grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. For this grant, “American art” is defined as art (circa 1500–1980) of what is now the geographic United States.
The eight Terra Foundation grantees for 2015 are:
- Celeste-Marie Bernier, Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin, Temple University Press
- René Brimo, The Evolution of Taste in American Collecting (L’Évolution du gout aux États-Unis, d’après l’histoire des collections), translated and edited by Kenneth Haltman, Pennsylvania State University Press
- J. B. Jackson, Habiter l’ouest (A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time), Wildproject Editions
- David Lubin, Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War, Oxford University Press
- Frank Mehring, The Mexico Diary: Winold Reiss between Vogue Mexico and Harlem Renaissance, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier and Bilingual Press
- Jennifer Mundy, Man Ray: Writings and Statements on Art, Getty Research Institute
- The Seth Siegelaub Source Book, Walther König
- Hélène Valance, Nuits américaines: l’art du nocturne aux États-Unis, 1890–1917, Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne
Two non-US authors of top-ranked books have also been awarded travel funds and complimentary registration for CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference in Washington DC, February 3–6, 2016, and a one-year membership in CAA.
The two author awardees for 2015 are:
- Celeste-Marie Bernier
- Hélène Valance
Please review the application guidelines for more information about this grant. Interested applicants must submit a letter of inquiry by September 21, 2015. Approved projects will be invited to submit applications by November 9, 2015.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 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.
Day of Protest
It started as a simple question on social media: What would happen if adjuncts across the country walked out on the same day, at the same time? That question got answered last week on the first-ever National Adjunct Walkout Day. There were some big walkouts at a few institutions but, for a variety of reasons, adjuncts at many more colleges and universities staged alternative protests, such as teach-ins, rallies, and talks. The movement led to unprecedented levels of conversation about the working conditions of the majority of college faculty. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Solace of Art
Art invites multiple possible readings. At its best, it embraces contradiction, dissent, ambiguity, and idiosyncrasy. It could be said that all art—all nonpropagandist art—is a form of resistance to the idea that the shape, the meaning, the myriad ways of living in and moving through the world should—or even could—ever be one thing. The greatest paintings, performances, sculptures, installations, and films refuse to represent anyone as a type: this is, perhaps, art’s finest attribute. (Read more from Frieze.)
How It’s Being Done: Arts Business Training across the US
As a follow up to its report How It’s Being Done: Arts Business Training in the US, the Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University has compiled a list of arts business training resources available either online or in person at no cost to the participant. The program hopes that you—as well as the artists and arts organizations you work with—find this resource list helpful. (Read more from the Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship.)
The Role of Creative Failure
As an artist you’re very demanding on yourself. You see all types of things that you think you could have done better, or that you want to challenge yourself to do. Setting high standards, high expectations—it’s a very self-critical life. You’re often your own hardest critic. But through executing well and through executing poorly, you get better. You see things more clearly. (Read more from NEA Arts.)
Activists Launch “Debt Strike” against College Chain
The debt-forgiveness movement born out of Occupy Wall Street has entered a new stage in its activism around student loans. Recently a wing of the campaign known as Debt Collective announced a “debt strike” by fifteen former students of the for-profit college chain Corinthian Colleges Inc. The former students said they will not repay any more of their student loans in protest of what they describe as predatory lending practices. (Read more from Al Jazeera.)
Let’s Give Service a Real Role
“Sarah, you are doing so well—excellent progress this year. However, the committee recommends that you do considerably less service next year.” That’s the message I heard in every annual evaluation during my PhD program. Even when I received accolades for my research and teaching, I was reminded that service is a third-class citizen in graduate-student training and that I would be better off focusing my energies elsewhere. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Why Photo Books Are Booming in a Digital Age
Since it set up in 2010, Self Publish, Be Happy, the online platform for self-published artists’ books, has been at the heart of booming interest in photographic books—in buying them, selling them, making them, exchanging them, sharing news of them on social media, attending book-signings that promote them—on a scale that has defied all predictions of the death of the physical book in a digital future. (Read more from the Financial Times.)
The Job Talk Q&A
Every part of a campus visit is important. Your meetings with faculty members count for a great deal. Your formal sit-down interview with the search committee provides critical information for its deliberations. Meals play a central role in establishing the tenor of your relationships with potential colleagues. But in my experience, the most important part of the campus visit is the Q&A after the job talk. (Read more from Vitae.)
CAA Statement on Mosul Museum Destruction
posted by Christopher Howard — February 26, 2015
CAA abhors the senseless destruction of ancient Assyrian sculpture that was publicized today. The Assyrians created sophisticated monumental sculpture that reflected their unique form of government, fostered urban development projects of palaces, temples and markets, built a prosperous economy and promoted reading and writing in cuneiform. The monumental works from this extraordinary ancient civilization had been preserved for over 2,500 years in one of the most important collections of Middle Eastern art, the Mosul Museum. CAA calls upon the Iraq and United States government as well as the ICOMOS, the World Monuments Fund and other international organizations to adhere to Hague Convention (1954), in concert with the public and the scholarly community, to develop and implement programs to protect ancient sites, monuments, antiquities, and cultural institutions in the case of war.
DeWitt Godfrey, CAA President
Linda Downs, Executive Director
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — February 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.
Why Is Art So Expensive?
I recently went to a gallery and saw pieces of broken glass selling for $1,000 per shard. Why? And why is art so expensive? (Read more from Slate.)
The Academy’s Dirty Secret
According to a new study that scrutinized more than 16,000 faculty members at 242 schools, just a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the US and Canada in business, computer science, and history. Just eighteen elite universities produce half of all computer-science professors, sixteen schools produce half of all business professors, and eight schools account for half of all history professors. (Read more from Slate.)
How to Start an Art School
There are plenty of examples out there, from fly-by-night, for-profit scoundrels to august, ivy-draped centuries-old institutions. Why not just join one of them rather than go through the trouble of starting something new? Unfortunately, the current model for art school is awful. Let us count the ways, easily summed in dollars. (Read more from Momus.)
Do Artist Branding and Hollywood Talent Agency Deals Kill an Artist’s Soul?
Many of us have seen the Andy Warhol Converse sneakers and the Uniqlo t-shirts adorned with famous artworks. We’ve seen the painted BMW cars and the branding of vodka bottles. If artists want to put their signature squiggles on a shoe or a bottle of booze, are they compromising their integrity in exchange for a bit of cash? (Read more from Artnet News.)
US Museums Capitalize on Baby Boomers’ Desire to Write Big Checks
Cultural giving among America’s top philanthropists fell slightly in 2014, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual ranking of the fifty largest charitable donors. The news might come as a surprise to US museum directors, who have been swiftly and quietly raising eight-, nine-, and ten-figure donations from eager patrons. Their ambitious capital campaigns make the austerity measures of the recent recession feel like a distant memory. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
From the Journal Editor’s Vantage Point
We could spend a lot of time discussing why academic journals accept so few manuscripts at the outset. Having satirized the peer-review process myself, I would be the first to acknowledge that it’s far from perfect. But pragmatically speaking, it’s important to realize that if you receive a revise-and-resubmit and decide to cut your losses and move on to another journal, you’re likely to face exactly the same outcome. (Read more from Vitae.)
We Need More STEM Majors with Liberal Arts Training
Our culture has drawn an artificial line between art and science, one that did not exist for many innovators. Leonardo da Vinci’s curiosity and passion for painting, writing, engineering, and biology helped him triumph in both art and science. And Steve Jobs once declared: “It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough—it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.” (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Yale to Launch Lens Media Lab for Photograph Research and Conservation
The Lens Media Laboratory, a new research facility that will apply scientific principles to the characterization and conservation of photographs and other lens-based media, has been created as part of the Yale Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage, a center dedicated to improving the science and practice of conservation globally. (Read more from Yale News.)