CAA News Today

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.

What’s a “Work for Hire” and Why Should You Care?

A provost learns to his dismay that the university shares copyright ownership of a popular MOOC with the professor who created it. A professor finds to her surprise that students who helped produce an animation to illustrate a lecture are co-owners of the copyright. Yet another professor, who wrote and put together a video for his course, is shocked to learn that the university that employs him and the company that produced the video share copyright ownership of it—without him. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Artists Call the Shots

When Gustave Courbet organized an exhibition of his work in 1855, it was a radical act—but now artist-curators are everywhere. That raises some questions: Do the restrictions faced by institutional curators lead to more historically accurate exhibitions? Does the pluralist attitude that fosters artist-curated shows open the door to curatorial misconceptions? Are artists simply more likely to get it wrong than academic curators? (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Help Desk: Participatory Project

I’m an artist working with a poor family on a participatory project at a local museum. The family is Latino, and the project is about the members’ perceptions on art. Who might I talk to or where might I look for similar projects, or even guidance on working with this population? I’m neither Latino nor poor. (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Are Museums The Best Place to Appreciate Art?

Philippe de Montebello, the longest-serving director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in its history, discusses how and why we look at art. In his new book, Rendez-vous with Art, he reflects on the importance of museums but wonders if they might be the worst possible places to look at art. (Read more from WNYC.)

Where the Time Goes

New data about time to degree in PhD programs from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences complicate some current reform efforts to help students get through graduate school faster. At the same time, the data suggest that real time to degree is shorter than many people think it is, and that it’s decreasing in some disciplines—albeit slowly. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

War Can Both Inspire and Inhibit Artistic Creativity

War can inhibit creativity. Societies engaged in conflict have fewer resources to spend on art; they also often restrict the freedom artists require. On the other hand, war can inspire creativity. Patriotic creators might feel an impulse—or receive an order—to create works intended to unite and galvanize the citizenry. Given those cross-currents, no wonder researchers have found an “ambiguous and counterintuitive relationship between war and the arts,” in the words of Karol Jan Borowiecki of the University of Southern Denmark. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)

Are There Banner Works of Art on Instagram?

For me, Instagram is a land of the midnight sun, a wide-open place that’s always lit up, bristling with visions, pictures, strangers, shooting stars, screwballs, and well-known artists posting images from everywhere, together creating this immense abstract missive or amazing rebus that seems to speak just to me, the curious curator of my own lit-up Instagramland. (Read more from Vulture.)

Learning to Love the Conference

In 2012, I was all set for the most important conference of my life. All three major branches of musicology would be there: theorists, musicologists, and ethnomusicologists. It was going to be my last real year on the academic job market, and, despite my rapidly aging degree, I was well positioned. I had conference interviews. I had meetings scheduled with publishers. I was going to put everything into that conference. (Read more from Vitae.)

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.

Is the Cultural Sector Ready to Move Beyond Data for Data’s Sake?

As any internet geek or high-priced consultant will tell you, we find ourselves today in the age of Big Data. You know, the era when science and numbers are supposed to solve all our problems forever? That one. And yet in the cultural sector, according to a report published earlier this year, we don’t have the data we need; we don’t know what to do with the data we have; and even if we did, we still wouldn’t use it to make decisions. (Read more from Createquity.)

Whose Work Is It Really? On the Much-Maligned Role of the Artist’s Assistant

The job of artist’s assistant has a confusing reputation in the press. Articles about the ongoing saga of Jasper Johns’s civil suit against his longtime assistant for the theft and sale of $3.4 million of his drawings is a prime example of the way the media talks about the relationship between artist and assistant. The horrifyingly theft aside, one recent article about the incident presents the power difference between an artist and his assistant as tauntingly acute and palpable. (Read more from Artslant.)

Assessing Assessment

In higher education circles, there is something of a feeding frenzy surrounding the issue of assessment. The federal government, due to release a proposed rating system later this fall, wants assessments to create ways to allow one to compare colleges and universities that provide “value”; accrediting organizations want assessments of student learning outcomes; state agencies want assessments to prove that tax dollars are being spent efficiently; institutions want internal assessments that they can use to demonstrate success to their own constituencies. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Help Desk: Ghost in the Art-Writing Machine

I’m a young curator and an arts writer with a museum job, but like everyone in the world, I can always use extra money. I’ve been approached before about “ghostwriting” for more established curators who get asked to write catalogue essays for galleries and small exhibition projects. In general, I feel weird but not too weird about this. After all, I like the practice and the opportunity to think about an artist’s work that I might not otherwise consider or know of. (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Teaching Feminism in Relation to Contemporary Art

Survey courses in contemporary art have tended to organize the field through movements, tendencies, and geographical areas. Women artists have been present in every movement, in every country, and in increasing numbers in contemporary art—approximately 20 to 40 percent of biennials and retrospectives and 40 to 50 percent of all artists today. It is possible to introduce a broad range of examples and case studies of work by women artists into every lecture. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

Paint and Paper: Making a Watercolor

Watercolor paper is an active part in the creation of a painting, for watercolor artists paint with their paper rather than simply upon it. For this reason, the watercolor paper an artist selects influences both the painting process and the finished work. Paper choice can be as personal as color palette and subject, and it is not unusual for a painter to have a favorite paper surface from a specific manufacturer. (Read more from Just Paint.)

A Letter to My Younger Self

Well you’ve done it. You started graduate school and, at two months in, you are beginning to get the hang of things. By now you’ve figured out that the coffee from the cafe downstairs is terrible, but at least this end of campus has all the good food trucks. You’re meeting people who will turn out to be incredible colleagues and friends. You’ve also developed a few organizational habits already, even though it’s been a chaotic start to the semester. I’m writing to let you know how unbelievably helpful those habits are going to be over the next five years. (Read more from Vitae.)

Professors’ Place in the Classroom Is Shifting to the Side

Professors have long made assumptions about their place in the classroom. They have seen themselves as the experts whose job is to transmit a body of knowledge, typically through a lecture. Students are there to absorb content. But after years of exhortations for faculty members to become guides on the side instead of sages on stage, those assumptions are shifting, and they carry consequences that could be significant for professors and students. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

What’s Next?

As part of my job, I mentor graduate students and early career faculty through the transition to nonacademic jobs. These career-changers have usually thought long and hard about their decision to seek a nonacademic career. It is not something that anyone seeking my help takes lightly. The most common thing I hear from my students and clients is, “I don’t know how to even begin looking for other types of jobs.” (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

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.

Getty Foundation Celebrates Thirty Years of Philanthropy

Celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year, the Getty Foundation is one of the most highly respected international funders of the visual arts in the world. The foundation has awarded 7,000 grants totaling more than $370 million, benefitting over 180 countries on all seven continents. It is the only foundation that funds projects that advance the understanding and preservation of the visual arts on a fully international basis. (Read more from the Getty Foundation.)

The Education of William Adams

At a recent National Endowment for the Humanties dinner for winners of the National Humanities Medal, William “Bro” Adams introduced his special guest Morgan Freeman, who could not help but laugh as he said the words, “Thanks, Bro.” What is the story behind his nickname? (Read more from Humanities.)

Adjunct Action Report Investigates Faculty Working Conditions and Advocates Federal Labor Protections and Accountability from Employers

A recently released SEIU/Adjunct Action report called Crisis at the Boiling Point tells an important story of what’s happening in academic labor by documenting and analyzing just how much work part-time faculty are doing, when they are doing it for free, and how federal employment laws often fail to protect the contingent workforce. This report also offers recommendations and actions that faculty, students, and concerned members of the community can take to begin to reclaim our higher-education system. (Read more from Adjunct Action.)

This Job Market Season, Interview More Adjuncts

Most tenure-track and tenured faculty have tremendous empathy for the plight of adjuncts. Aside from a few “lifeboaters” here and there, the prevailing attitude in the academy is a self-aware and very correct “there but for the grace of [favorite deity], go I.” But when it comes to concrete measures to improve academic labor conditions, many ladder faculty still feel, and not without reason, like their hands are tied. (Read more from Vitae.)

Creative Exchange Launched to Drive Grassroots Projects

The Knight Foundation has teamed up with the Minnesota-based nonprofit Springboard for Arts to help American artists launch grassroots initiatives, from pop-up museums to health fairs that connect uninsured artists with doctors. The project, called Creative Exchange, gives enterprising artists access to on-call experts and free step-by-step guides to replicate previously successful programs. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Science and Art Meet, Unveiling Mystery and Cultural Tragedy

In the last decade, art conservators—the people who protect and preserve works of art—have begun practicing complicated science. Now they can tell more stories of the secret lives of artists, the chemistry behind great works, and why many of the most famous masterpieces no longer look anything like they did when they were painted. They also discovered that one form of paint may reduce great works of modern and Impressionist art into white canvases with smudges. (Read more from Inside Science.)

The Forever Professors

The 1994 law ending mandatory retirement at age 70 for university professors substantially mitigated the problem of age discrimination within universities. But out of this law a vexing new problem has emerged: a graying—yea, whitening—professoriate. The law, which allows tenured faculty members to teach as long as they want, means professors are increasingly delaying retirement past age 70 or even choosing not to retire at all. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Ageism in Academe

Senior faculty. It sounds like an honorific. It isn’t. It’s more a sort of stigmata. Being called “senior faculty” stigmatizes you. I’m called “senior faculty” quite a lot. I have been teaching journalism for thirty-three years, twenty-nine at the same college. My career in academe, begun with innocent hopes and fearsome ambitions, is nearing its obvious end. I expect to be bid farewell in the style to which I have been made accustomed. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

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.

DIY Careers: How to Get Paid for Your Art

Often the biggest unknown in launching a DIY career is accounting. Most of us who go down this road are artists of one kind or another, so we don’t necessarily bring a lot of business acumen to the venture. We know how to create but not how to monetize our creation. Of course, not everyone is interested in assigning a value to their art, but anyone who is needs to incorporate some basic business knowledge into their creative endeavor. (Read more from Vitae.)

How Do Award-Winning Artists Spend Their Prize Money

The modern artist faces a conundrum: good work needs time and space, imaginative and physical. But making work also costs money; studios and materials don’t come cheap, and even aesthetes have to eat. So you get a job that pays … then you don’t have the time—or headspace—to make the work. We hear about the super-successful celebrity artists who make a fortune, but they are the minority. For emerging artists, making work and making ends meet is rarely easy. (Read more from the Independent.)

Full Ninth Circuit to Review California Resale Royalty Act En Banc

Several weeks ago, the parties to the appeal over the constitutionality of the California Resale Royalty Act briefed the question about whether the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals should hear the case, rather than a three-judge panel that would otherwise be assigned to the case. The Ninth Circuit granted the petition in late October, meaning the appeal will now go before the full court. The issue in the case is a California law that requires royalties on secondary sales of art, something that is not part of US copyright law and is more common in civil law countries as “droit de suite.” (Read more from the Art Law Report.)

If Artists Need to Know about VARA, So Do Judges

On August 11, 2010, Gasser Grunert Gallery in Manhattan sold Jomar Statkun’s painting Tubal Cain at Beggar’s Creek (2009) to an art collector for $16,000. Less a 50 percent commission, Statkun walked away with an $8,000 sale. At a party two years later, Statkun met a former employee of the gallery who told him that the gallery facilitated that sale by cropping ten inches off the painting to suit the space needs of the collector. (Read more from re:sculpt.)

How We Look When We Look at a Painting

Among the abounding fascinations of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a three-hour documentary about the museum on London’s Trafalgar Square, is a leitmotif of lingering shots of solitary viewers of paintings. Looking at art may be the most unguarded action that we perform in public. We aren’t aware of performing, of course, nor do we openly watch one another doing so. Wiseman’s studies of people entranced, or stupefied, by Leonardos and Vermeers amount to a pictorial essay on self-forgetting: faces young and old, plain and fancy, each as vulnerable as that of a sleepwalker. (Read more from the New Yorker.)

At Harvard, Three Become One

Three institutions will be united under one roof when the Harvard Art Museums reopen after a six-year building project. The Renzo Piano–designed scheme on the edge of the Harvard campus doubles the museums’ combined square footage, increasing gallery space by 40 percent. But the changes at Harvard extend well beyond bricks and mortar and creating extra space to show more of its 250,000-strong art collection. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

On Elite Campuses, an Arts Race

Closed for six years, the Harvard Art Museums reopen after a radical overhaul by the architect Renzo Piano. He saved only the shell of the chaste, red-bricked Fogg Museum and its interior courtyard, extending it upward in sheets of glass and elegant truss work. Galleries wrap the new public space, but so do a materials lab, an art-conservation suite, and a study center, where students, faculty, and visitors can learn from the collection of 250,000 objects. (Read more from the New York Times.)

What the Midterm Elections Mean for the Arts: Summary of 2014 Election

In this year’s midterm elections, Republicans took back the Senate, kept control of the House, and won governorships in thirty-one states and counting. What does that mean for you and for us, as strong advocates of the arts and arts education? Here we break down the national, state, and local results—and their potential impact on the arts. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)

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.

Judge OKs Bankruptcy Plan: A “Miraculous” Outcome

A federal judge approved a plan to end Detroit’s historic Chapter 9 bankruptcy, giving the Motor City an unprecedented shot at recovering from decades of economic despair and municipal mismanagement that left the city awash in debt and struggling to provide basic public services. Judge Steven Rhodes ruled that Detroit’s comprehensive restructuring plan is fair and feasible, providing the legal authority for the city to slash more than $7 billion in unsecured liabilities and reinvest $1.4 billion over ten years in public services and blight removal. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)

“Grand Bargain” Saves the Detroit Institute of Arts

With his decision approving this city’s federal bankruptcy plan, Judge Steven W. Rhodes—aided by nearly a billion dollars in private and state rescue money—ended an unprecedented threat to the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose world-class paintings and sculpture could have been parceled off at auction to help pay city debt. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Warburg Institute Safe as High Court Rules Contents Not the Property of University of London

To the benefit and relief of scholars worldwide, the High Court has rejected the University of London’s claims that all additions to the Warburg Institute since 1944 belong to the university, and instead agreed that they form part of the institute. Furthermore, Justice Proudman held that the University is obliged to provide funding for the activities of the Warburg Institute. (Read more from the Warburg Institute.)

Help Desk: Crowd Funding

I have many friends who are running crowd-funding campaigns. Part of me wants to contribute because these people are my friends, but I would never think to ask others to fund my art practice. Should I give to these campaigns or pretend I never saw the emails? Should I run one myself the next time I need to travel or buy a new laptop? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Emerging Artists and the New Spirit of Capitalism

Pointing to the avarice of the art world, to its entanglement with big money, is an old game. Concerns about the “corrupting influence” of the market are likely as old as the market itself, and are still voiced with some frequency. Most recently David Bryne caused a surprising ripple of ire by describing how the big money of the Chelsea art scene was making it difficult for him to give the work itself a fair viewing. However, the issue of contemporary art’s relationship to capitalism is more complicated and thorny than being merely a matter of the staggering prices demanded at elite galleries. (Read more from Public Seminar.)

What Can You Really Do with a Degree in the Arts?

Is my BA in creative writing of any use to me at all? It’s hard to say. I sort of have a career in the arts in that I write and think about art all the time. But the relationship between my arts career and my actual career is tenuous. I earn my living writing, but it’s not exactly the type of writing they were preparing me for back at Oberlin. Rather than poetry or fiction or even creative nonfiction, I write entries for business encyclopedias, create items for high school and elementary standardized tests, and do the occasional online study guide for Stephen King novels. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

NCIS: Provence: The Van Gogh Mystery

For many decades, suicide was the unquestioned final chapter of Vincent van Gogh’s legend. But in their 2011 book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith offered a far more plausible scenario—that van Gogh was killed—only to find themselves under attack. Now, with the help of a leading forensic expert, the authors take their case a step further. (Read more from Vanity Fair.)

Culture War: The Case against Repatriating Museum Artifacts

Repatriation claims on the national identity of antiquities are at the root of many states’ cultural property laws, which in the last few decades have been used by governments to reclaim objects from museums and other collections abroad. Despite UNESCO’s declaration that “no culture is a hermetically sealed entity,” governments are increasingly making claims of ownership of cultural property on the basis of self-proclaimed and fixed state-based identities. (Read more from Foreign Affairs.)