CAA News Today

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Dear Art School Grads, Do What You Love—but Never for Free

Even if your dream job is to do something creative full-time, you’ll have to get used to the business side of whatever you do. That means shaking habits you might’ve learned in college to produce great work, or ditching assumptions that led you to take that unpaid internship. Above all else, it means always charging what you’re worth—starting now, no exceptions. (Read more from Fast Company.)

Should Artists Have to Talk about Their Work?

An artist’s ability to give a Big Talk has been part of the job for years. There are many ways an artist can shape this talk—this overview of his or her work—or willfully avoid shaping it. But when did we decide that artists have to be able to talk about their work in order to justify the work’s value, or its existence? (Read more from Glasstire.)

Jerry Saltz’s Life as a Failed Artist

It pains me to say it, but I am a failed artist. “Pains me” because nothing in my life has given me the boundless psychic bliss of making art for tens of hours at a stretch for a decade in my twenties and thirties, doing it every day and always thinking about it, looking for a voice to fit my own time, imagining scenarios of success and failure. (Read more from Vulture.)

World’s First Graphene Paint Launches in the UK

The miracle material graphene—considered the strongest substance known to science—has been used to make ecofriendly paint by the manufacturer Graphenstone. The paint is made from a pure lime base that has been combined with graphene—a recently engineered material hailed as the thinnest, strongest, and most conductive ever developed. (Read more from De Zeen.)

Is LA’s Art Scene Growing Too Quickly?

For years, Los Angeles seemed perpetually about to come into its own, always a soon-to-arrive international art city. Now that international attention and infrastructural shifts suggest it has arrived, the question becomes how to save some of the freedom that LA’s always-emerging state previously allowed it. (Read more from Apollo.)

Structures of Power and the Ethical Limits of Speech

Broad constitutional protections mean that, when it comes to artistic expression, direct government censorship is limited and declining. In contrast, private constraints on expression are on the rise: they range from the limits set by social-media platforms and self-censorship resulting from market demands to programmatic decisions made in response to political pressure from ad hoc groups. (Read more from Truthdig.)

Theory from the Ruins

The polemical theories of the Frankfurt School remain indispensable in the present age, when the dilemmas and malaises once specific to Western societies have expanded to encompass the whole globe. As a new era of irrationalism dawns on humankind, with corruption and mendacity becoming an openly avowed modus operandi for all shades of government, the Frankfurt analysis urges itself upon us once more. (Read more from Aeon.)

Tread Carefully with the Socratic Method

Many of us use some version of the Socratic method in our classrooms to stimulate critical thinking. What if a student takes offense to something we said—perhaps while we were playing devil’s advocate—and accuses us of some form of discrimination? On today’s hypersensitized campuses, that has become a very real possibility. (Read more from Vitae.)

Why Are Americans So Hostile to State-Funded Art?

Before the establishment of the NEA, arts and culture support remained the project of urban elites, business communities, and institutional philanthropy. When the government eventually intervened, it supported artists through passive systems like tax exemptions for cultural organizations and for donations by wealthy patrons. (Read more from the New Republic.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

How a $25,000 NEA Grant Became a Springboard for Change in a Rural Minnesota Community

A grant of $25,000 is not even a drop in the bucket of the US federal government’s spending, but it effected visible change in Fergus Falls, a small rural community in Minnesota with a population of 13,000, which received that dollar amount from an NEA grant in 2011. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Is It Time for an Arts Think Tank Yet?

Two or three organizations have taken up studies, research, and positions on arts and culture topics, but these have been isolated, occasional forays. There is no think tank that has as its principal charge the arts, humanities, creativity, culture, heritage, and other facets and divisions of the wider field of culture and creativity. (Read more from Barry’s Blog.)

After Protests from Native American Community, Walker Art Center Will Remove Public Sculpture

Less than a week before the Walker Art Center was scheduled to open its newly renovated sculpture garden, it announced that one of the major new works added to the park will be removed. The sculpture in question, Scaffold (2012) by the Los Angeles–based artist Sam Durant, is a giant structure made of steel and wood. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Discovered in a Lab, a New Superblue Has Been Unleashed upon the World as a Crayola Crayon

When the chemist Mas Subramanian accidentally discovered the brilliantly bright YInMn blue at Oregon State University in 2009, he had no idea the bold shade would one day be embraced by doodling schoolchildren everywhere. Now, the first new blue pigment discovered in two hundred years is poised to become part of your kid’s next Crayola crayon box set. (Read more from Artnet News.)

These Eight Zines by People of Color Show Why the Medium Has Remained Relevant

There has been a resurgence of print in the age of expeditious digital consumption. The popularity of zines today, however, should not be chocked up to nostalgia alone. Rather, the printed medium has long been a tool for political and social engagement among artists and writers of color. (Read more from Artsy.)

The Dissertation-to-Book Transition

Which aspects of a dissertation are most commonly tossed out when presented in book format? For instance, while most of my dissertation is written as a book, I reserved an entire chapter for methodology. I assume that section will be significantly condensed—if not scrapped altogether —as a book manuscript? (Read more from Vitae.)

Is Criticism Dead Yet? Does Anyone Care?

Remember not so long ago when the crisis of criticism was on everyone’s tongue? It was only a couple of years ago, but it seems like a lifetime. Panels were convened, postmortems performed. The consensus, as far as there was one, was that the internet killed criticism. (Read more from Glasstire.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Modern African Art Is Being Gentrified

I am tempted to think of contemporary African art as akin to an urban neighborhood undergoing gentrification. Now that it is high culture, investors are jostling to get a piece of the action, and private collections are growing in Africa and around the world. This is very good news for the African modernists who will benefit from the increased visibility. (Read more from the New York Times.)

The States Where Campus Free-Speech Bills Are Being Born

Last week Tennessee’s governor signed into law a measure that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education called “the most comprehensive state legislation protecting free speech on college campuses that we’ve seen passed anywhere in the country.” That new law, among other things, bars public colleges from establishing “free-speech zones” and requires them to adopt broad statements of support for free expression. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Agnes Gund on Diversity in the Art World and the Future of MoMA

In addition to helping museums like MoMA and the Met keep their doors open, Agnes Gund has also been devoted to increasing the diversity of the people who walk through those doors, by funding avenues for art education that reach beyond the halls of private schools to less privileged students who don’t have the same elite cultural access. (Read more from Artnet News.)

Why Can’t the Art World Embrace Robert Rauschenberg’s Queer Community?

Like Merce Cunningham and John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg found beauty in everyday objects. Through close observation, the quotidian could bloom into something either sublime or subversive. This is a tenet of queer art, the ability to transform normativity into the unexpected. (Read more from Artsy.)

On Not Writing a Book Right Now

I recently stumbled across a 2016 Paris Review essay about Robert Caro that notes, “If there is a question that annoys Caro more than ‘Do you like Lyndon Johnson?’ it is ‘When will the next book be published?’” I understand. No question makes me cringe more than “What are you working on next?” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Writing a Book Pre-Tenure

I wrote a book before I earned tenure—a feat, given the heavy teaching and service load at my institution. Because my situation is different from most tenure-track faculty, talking about my book’s journey isn’t useful for other academics. Instead, I want to share the most important things I learned when writing my first book pre-tenure. (Read more from Vitae.)

“What Are the Arts and Sciences?”

Dan Rockmore asks a seemingly simple question in the title of collection he has just edited, What Are the Arts and Sciences? A Guide for the Curious. But the book is about disciplines, and not just the arts and sciences as a group. Twenty-six of his colleagues at Dartmouth College wrote chapters, explaining their disciplines for the nonexpert. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

U Can’t Talk 2 Ur Professor Like This

After one too many students called me by my first name and sent me email that resembled a drunken late-night Facebook post, I took a very fogeyish step. I began attaching a page on etiquette to every syllabus: basic rules for how to address teachers and write polite, grammatically correct emails. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Damien Hirst Show Sparks Accusations of Cultural Appropriation

Damien Hirst launched his first major show of new works in ten years earlier this month in Venice, shortly ahead of the opening of the Venice Biennale. But along with massive crowds, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable is attracting charges of cultural appropriation, with one of Hirst’s sculptures replicating a Nigerian work from the fourteenth century without proper historical context. (Read more from Artsy.) 

Cultural Appropriation and the Privilege of Creative Assumption

When the Canadian writer W. P. Kinsella died last year at age 81, many laudatory obituaries politely noted that he had been the subject of controversy involving cultural appropriation in the 1980s. Critics, both white and Indigenous, had objected vociferously to Kinsella’s “Indian” stories, in which the writer used a first-person narrator to tell funny tales of reserve life that included bumbling white bureaucrats and native tricksters. (Read more from the Globe and Mail.)

Words Fly on Free-Speech Bill

Numerous states are considering legislation designed to ensure free speech on college campuses, following violent protests over speakers at the University of California, Berkeley, and Middlebury College. Some of the bills would, controversially, mandate punishing students who disrupt campus speakers and require institutions to keep mum on political issues—and perhaps nowhere has the debate been as contentious as in Wisconsin. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Student Rights and the Role of Faculty

Despite the few reasonable similarities between students and customers, it’s still a hair-raising comparison for most faculty. I wonder if we might look at the issue more constructively by considering it from the vantage of student rights. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

For Robert Rauschenberg, No Artist Is an Island

We tend to think of artists as natural loners, off in their studios, wrestling with their inner selves. But Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends, which opens soon at the Museum of Modern Art, points us in a different direction. It situates Rauschenberg’s work amid that of two dozen fellow artists who provided an audience for one another in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s. (Read more from the New York Times.)

The Arts Brand

“Branding” is a somewhat confusing topic. Briefly, our “brand” is the public’s awareness and perception of our organizations and the goods and services we offer. It is the sum of their perceptions and experiences and is created by all the various parts of our organizations. (Read more from Barry’s Blog.)

Demystifying the Journal Article

One of the most important parts of professionalization is publishing your research. Much of what I’ve learned about publishing comes from submitting papers to journals, incorporating reviewer comments, workshopping papers, and having conversations with colleagues and mentors. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Artists’ Commissions, Tech Gift, and Guns: The Legal Issues Facing US Museums

What’s keeping museum lawyers up at night? The new future. That was the message at the annual meeting of over two hundred museum professionals and lawyers in Dallas. They discussed how to stay out of trouble when commissioning installation and performance art, how to prepare for changes to US tax law, and how best to collaborate with technology companies. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

In Higher Ed, Adjuncts May Have Most to Lose if Obamacare Is Repealed

Perhaps no group working on college campuses had more at stake in last week’s vote in the US House of Representatives to repeal the Affordable Care Act than contingent faculty members. Full-time faculty and staff members can typically count on their institutions to provide health insurance, but most part-time professors are on their own. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Defying Trump, Bipartisan Deal Would Boost Funding for NEA and NEH (with Strings Attached)

Far from slashing or even zeroing the budgets for the NEA and NEH, a bipartisan budget agreement to avoid a government shutdown—which, at this writing, awaits final passage and President Trump’s signature—includes moderate increases culture-related institutions and programs. (Read more from CultureGrrl.)

The NEA Really Isn’t “Welfare for Rich, Liberal Élites”

Killing the NEA has long been a cause célèbre for budget hawks and social conservatives. But contrary to claims from Trump and Fox News, and to the insecurities of artists, the NEA is not a federal spigot for decadent city élites. Rather, its grant-making effectively spans the country and helps rural, not–New York, not-wealthy, Trump-friendly districts. (Read more from the New Yorker.)

Beyond Aesthetic: Art That Wills Change 

Last weekend, seven artists from around the world gathered in the Logan Center for the Arts to address a weighty question: “What Is an Artistic Practice of Human Rights?” Through a multiday summit that explored issues such as US criminal policies, the refugee crisis, and the hypocrisy of governments, the artists not only formed a community among themselves, but constructed a discourse with the audience. (Read more from the Chicago Maroon.)

Help Desk: The Penis Award

I am a midcareer (female) artist married to an established (male) artist. Throughout our relationship, I have endured innumerable comments and actions that validate my husband and cast me into the shadows. The sexism of the art world astounds me, but I’m not sure what I can do. (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Ten Art Schools That Promise a Healthy Return on Investment

A career in the arts is not generally thought of as a pathway to a great salary, job security and financial fortune. But where you go to school to get your degree can have an impact. With that in mind, Forbes examined a recent report from PayScale.com, a salary, benefits, and compensation information company based in Seattle. (Read more from Forbes.)

A Fair-Use Primer for Graduate Students

When I try to imagine what a Campbell’s Soup can looks like, I am not sure if what I see is the actual object or one of Andy Warhol’s famous works. These iconic cans, regardless of their importance to modern art and American history, are a tangle of popular culture, artistic expression, and copyright litigation, all of which knot around the concept of fair use. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Arts Groups on Edge as New York City Reevaluates Cultural Funding

 The elite, marble-arched museums of Manhattan never had to worry about competing for city money with the small-fry arts groups of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. But this two-tiered system of haves and have-nots is poised to undergo its biggest transformation in decades. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Top Twenty Most Vibrant Arts Communities in America

Southern Methodist University’s National Center for Arts Research has announced its third annual Arts Vibrancy Index, which ranks more than nine hundred communities across the country, examining the level of supply, demand, and government support for the arts in each city. (Read more from the National Center for Arts Research.)

What Other States Can Learn from Rhode Island’s Arts Incentives

While Rhode Island may be the smallest state in the country, it has become a powerhouse for attracting artists and art lovers to its shores. And the method by which state leaders have leveraged Rhode Island’s tax code to benefit the creative community could serve as a model for other states looking to cultivate a stronger arts economy. (Read more from Charleston City Paper.)

US Students Are Struggling in the Arts. Donald Trump’s Budget Would Make the Problem Worse

American teenagers are not excelling in the arts, and President Trump’s proposed budget cuts will likely make matters worse, experts say. The most recent results of a wide-ranging national educational assessment known as the Nation’s Report Card left significant room for improvement in the visual arts and music, the National Center for Education Statistics reported last week. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Want Happier Professors? Try Being Nice

When it comes to keeping tenured professors content in their jobs, you can catch more flies with honey than you can with big faculty-focused strategic initiatives. A new study has found that their organizational commitment hinged far more on whether they believed they worked in a caring, supportive environment than on their sense that administrators had undertaken broad efforts to support the faculty. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Frieze New York Gets Reframed for the Post-Truth Era

Reflecting director Victoria Siddall’s aim that Frieze, true to its editorial roots, should be “a place where art is made, discussed, and debated,” there will be protest in the air when the fair unfurls its serpentine white tent for its sixth edition in New York. Some galleries are using Frieze as a platform to respond to current events. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Wait—What Was That? History’s Bygone Art Movements

“Fame,” according to art critic Henry McBride, “is a most uncertain garment.” The same is true of art movements and labels. Some—Abstract Expressionism, for instance—are familiar to the average museumgoer. However, others that were at one time in the vanguard have slipped into the shadows and are now the province of art historians and other specialists. (Read more from ARTnews.)

Was Robert Rauschenberg the Con Man of Art? 

There’s a volubility about Rauschenberg’s visual imagination that is irreconcilable with the discipline art demands. However monumental or panoramic a work of art may be, there must always be some acknowledgment of the limits of the artist’s vision. There was something of the outrageousness of a Ponzi scheme in the way Rauschenberg took this or that avant-garde idea and inflated it—over and over again. (Read more from the New York Review of Books.)

How Big Is the Online Art Market?

Despite a relative slowdown in the global art market, the online art market grew by 15 percent, to $3.75 billion, last year, according to Robert Read, head of art and private clients for Hiscox. The online art market’s share of the total art market also grew last year, from 7.4 percent in 2015 to 8.4 percent. While that may seem small, it is roughly equivalent to ecommerce sales’ share of the total retail market, which reached 8.3 percent last year, according to the US census. (Read more from Artnet News.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

A Letter to Soon-to-Be Art School Graduates

You’re about to begin your career as artists. At this defining moment of transition, I’d like to offer five pieces of advice that I wish someone had shared with me when I graduated art school. (Read more from CERF+.)

Help Desk: Recommendations for References

I am often torn when applying for jobs, residencies, and grants when it comes to references. Is it better to list the names of people you do not know well but carry more name recognition, or to list the names of lesser-known people you know well and would give you a good reference? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

How Galleries Support Their Artists

Galleries have multiple roles, both visible and invisible: to incubate and support their artists, often by going above and beyond the normal work of putting on shows, promoting their artists, and selling the works; and to providing services such as financial management or book publishing, to help their artists focus more fully on their work. (Read more from Artsy.)

Group Shows Bring Together Works by Black Women Artists

Nearly forty years ago, CAA’s National Women’s Caucus for Art planned an exhibition featuring works by “Afro-American” women artists. Cocurated by Emily Martin and Tritobia Benjamin of Howard University, the show was to be presented at the 1979 Annual Conference in Washington, DC. (Read more from Culture Type.)

The Kids Are Right

Is it inherently misguided to suggest some speech ought to be restricted not by law but by informal rules? Is the space in the discourse that liberalism has granted to bigots emboldened by the Trump era a real problem or not? (Read more from Slate.)

Critique vs. Harassment

The visual arts sometimes involve painful critiques of student work, but the University of Central Florida has warned a well-known professor that he crossed the line into harassment with some salty comments allegedly directed at a female student in an advanced painting class. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

To Depoliticize Art, Trump Has to Do More Than End Federal Endowments

Shut up and go fund yourself. That’s President Trump’s message to arts organizations in his proposal for eliminating the NEA and NEH. CAA is not amused. Declaring “complete and total opposition” to the proposal, it offers toolkits to members to arm them for a fight. (Read more from the Federalist.)

Congressman to Appeal Removal of Art Showing Cops as Pigs, Citing Free Speech

A Missouri congressman is appealing a judge’s ruling in a long-simmering dispute involving a 19-year-old’s painting that shows policemen as pigs. The work was on display at the US Capitol as part of a student art competition and has outraged Republican Congressmen and the conservative media, who have branded the work “anti-police.” (Read more from Artnet News.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

The More Things Change

Pay for full-time faculty members rose 2.6 percent this academic year over last, according to “Visualizing Change,” the American Association of University Professors’ Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession. But professors shouldn’t get too excited: adjusted for inflation, that amounts to just 0.5 percent. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

A New Site Is Helping High-Quality Creatives Find Work—and Get Paid

Easle is a freshly launched online platform that aims to connect high-quality creatives with reliable clients across the globe. Through an algorithm, the site helps match creatives with jobs that are well suited to their skills and then facilitates the logistics of paperwork and payment. (Read more from Artsy.)

A Syllabus for Making Work about Race as a White Artist in America

Many white-identified students, artists, and art workers feel stuck in that racial construct. They are nervous to tread into any conversation about race and avoid the question. But what about those who identify as white and still want to make works rich with social and historical narrative? (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Donated Slides from the Met Get a Second Life

It is definitely a digital-age question: What to do with old-fashioned color slides of all-but-forgotten visits to see Grandma or department store Santas? Year after year, they lie in their boxes on a shelf, no longer looked at. The Metropolitan Museum of Art faced the same question on a much larger scale. It had thousands of 35mm slides, showing everything from close-ups of Manets and Monets to wide-angle shots of the galleries. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Designed for Social Change

Though “spatial justice” is often thought of as an enterprise in the public realm, like the construction of parks and community centers, it’s not as frequently addressed in the private realm. Because housing is essential to well-being, the architect Dana McKinney hopes to eventually create spaces that promote not just equality, but equity. (Read more from the Harvard Gazette.)

Bringing Respect to the Craft Artist

Giving lesser-known artists visibility is key to the mission of the Craft and Folk Art Museum, says executive director Suzanne Isken, whose institution has an annual operating budget of about $730,000. Which is why a $25,000 grant from the NEA has been so crucial for the Los Angeles museum to stage its current exhibition, Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

Publishers and Open-Resource Advocates Square Off on the Future of Course Content

At a friendly yet spirited debate last month over the pros and cons of open educational resources, publishers and open-access advocates agreed on at least one thing—the “old” textbook market is broken. But that’s pretty much where the common ground ended. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Pedagogic Approaches to Teaching with Art in the Sciences

When dealing with courses in the hard and life sciences, we approach engagement with art differently. Founded on the types of interactions with the collection that STEM faculty tend to request and on the recent pedagogic emphasis on active, inquiry-based learning that also touches on the creative aspects of science, we distinguish four kinds of interactions with art: skill-building, thematic, problem-based, and dispositional. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)