CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — November 05, 2014
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.
W.A.G.E. Certification
Working Artists and the Greater Economy has launched W.A.G.E. Certification, a paradigm-shifting model for the remuneration of artistic labor in the nonprofit sector. W.A.G.E. Certification is a program that publicly recognizes nonprofit arts organizations that demonstrate a history of, and commitment to, voluntarily paying artist fees—it is also the first of its kind in the US that establishes a sector-wide minimum standard for compensation, as well as a clear set of guidelines and standards for the conditions under which artistic labor is contracted. (Read more from e-flux.)
Tenure Track Wisdom, Part 3
In the third of this series of faculty interviews, we hear from Steph Hinnershitz, who just started her second year as an assistant professor of history at Valdosta State University in southern Georgia. (Read more from Vitae.)
Indicting Higher Education in the Arts and Beyond
There’s one very clear take-away from the latest report released by the collective BFAMFAPhD: people who graduate with arts degrees regularly end up with a lot of debt and incredibly low prospects for earning a living as artists. Or, as they put it in the report, titled Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists, “the fantasy of future earnings in the arts cannot justify the high cost of degrees.” (Read more from Hyperallergic.)
Unbound: The Politics of Scanning
The romanticized image of the scanner is based on the assumption that by scanning and uploading we make information available, and that that is somehow an invariably democratic act. Scanning has become synonymous with transparency and access. But does the document dump generate meaningful analysis, or make it seem insignificant? (Read more from Rhizome.)
Intentional Conferencing
Conferences are not cheap. They are exhausting and usually require you to travel. You are taking time away from work, which means risking feeling behind when you return. You arrive home sleep-deprived, information-overloaded, and struggling to play catch-up. So why do we go? We attend conferences to learn, network, and take new ideas back to our institutions. Does this always happen? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Teaching and the University of Tomorrow
Last week, I attended the De Lange Conference held at Rice University every other year, this time on “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow.” The future-oriented theme had both intrigued me, and left me a little skeptical. But ultimately I was won over by the chance to attend, for the first time, a conference exclusively focused on teaching. I would be able to talk shop about learning and pedagogy. Like many other academics, I’m concerned about what the university of tomorrow might become. (Read more from Vitae.)
Everybody’s an Art Curator
This winter, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History will feature an exhibit of works relating to the ocean, with paintings and sculptures by established artists alongside works by local residents. According to a call for submissions, that includes not just watercolors of Pacific sunsets, but “that awesome GoPro footage you took while surfing” and “your two-year-old’s drawing of the beach that’s been on the fridge for five months.” Museums are increasingly outsourcing the curation of their exhibits to the public—sometimes even asking the crowd to contribute art, too. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Seeking a Postdoc
An advice seeker writes, “My adviser tells me not even to bother applying for postdocs—the competition is too intense. Is that true?” Of course you can apply for postdocs. Yes the competition is fierce, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. As you craft your application, make sure that it proves four key things: that your research is legitimate, necessary, and viable, and that it meets the needs (or advances the mission) of the hosting laboratory, department, campus, or program. (Read more from Vitae.)
NAMTA Survey on Artists’ Materials
posted by Christopher Howard — November 03, 2014
The International Art Materials Association, better known as NAMTA, asks CAA members to contribute to the Artists and Art Materials Survey, a major international study that should take about ten minutes to complete. NAMTA is an association of hundreds of independent and family-owned art materials manufacturers and retailers. The survey deadline is November 25, 2014.
This survey is anonymous—you will not receive marketing spam after taking it. Results will be published in the third edition of the NAMTA Artists and Art Materials Study, which will be freely available to nonprofit arts organizations, colleges and universities, art school, and NAMTA members in January 2015.
By taking this survey you will help artist organizations, art schools, and businesses serve you better, as well as tell art-supply stores and suppliers what artists want. You may also receive free digital issues of The Artist’s Magazine and Professional Artist and get the chance to win one of five $100 art supply store gift cards. Please forward this webpage to your colleagues and students, as their contributions to the survey are essential.
NAMTA will make the 2015 NAMTA Artists and Art Materials Study available free of charge to college art organizations and institutions. If you work for an educational institution or arts nonprofit, please sign up at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NAMTAresults. NAMTA will send you the survey results in early 2015.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 29, 2014
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.
An Interview with Jane Chu, Chairman of the NEA
Jane Chu was confirmed as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts this past June. She recently answered a few questions about the NEA’s priorities in relation to local arts agencies. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)
Study Shows That Recent Arts Alumni Are Resilient, Adaptable, and Involved
A study released by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project shows that America’s most recent arts graduates are using skills learned in school combined with internship experiences to find work, forge careers, and engage their communities, despite higher student debt levels than older alumni. The report, Making It Work: The Education and Employment of Recent Arts Graduates, analyzes data from more than 88,000 arts alumni of all ages, with a particular focus on the 17,000 recent alumni—those who finished their undergraduate or graduate level degrees up to five years prior. (Read more from Indiana University Bloomington.)
Georgia State University’s Loss in “E-Reserves” Case Might Actually Be a Win for Librarians
Two weeks ago a federal appeals court ended that celebration by reversing the judge’s decision and sending the “e-reserves” case back to the lower court for further action. At a glance, the latest ruling looks like a loss for Georgia State University and its allies, and a win for three academic publishers that had sued it. But was it, really? In the days since the ruling was issued, several university-based copyright experts have argued that the reversal is not as bad as it might seem. (Read more from Wired Campus.)
The Best Teaching Resources on the Web
Those of us old enough to remember traveling to an out-of-the-way library to track down a potentially crucial roll of microfilm know just how much new technologies have transformed the way academics do research. We now happily rely on Google Books, JSTOR, and a whole parade of resources and databases available at the click of a finger. But what may be less obvious is the way new technologies have made improving our teaching a whole lot easier as well. (Read more from Vitae.)
Participatory Learning in the Art-History Classroom
In a participatory learning environment, learners get the opportunity to become part of a community of inquiry and explore abstract concepts in a nonhierarchical social context. Rather than the mere transmission and acquisition of knowledge, learning becomes relevant, engaging, and creative. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Tenure Track Wisdom Part Two
In the second of this series of faculty interviews, we hear from Laura Krystal Porterfield, who just finished her first year as an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. She received her PhD in urban education in 2013 from Temple University, where she a held fellowship at the Center for the Humanities. (Read more from Vitae.)
Finding a Job While ABD
Going on the job market without a degree in hand, emphasizing that holding off on job-searching until the dissertation, is a luxury that is not available to everyone. Yet the prospect of landing a job can be an invaluable motivator for an ABD candidate struggling with dissertation procrastination. Here are some tips for ABDs on how to juggle the demands of grad-student life and job searching while maximizing your chances at job-market success. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Museum Interface
It’s no longer a question of whether art institutions should have a virtual presence. Rather, the onus is being placed on designers to facilitate meaningful interactions with art that might occur in the gallery, via web-based applications or in new hybrid spaces that merge the real and the virtual. Any attempt to augment an encounter with artwork using technological means invariably raises questions about the values we assign to certain modes of viewing. After all, isn’t visiting a museum inherently tied to a very deep, very primary real-life experience? (Read more from Art in America.)
Mellon Foundation Awards Grant to CAA to Partner with SAH on Digital Scholarship Guidelines
posted by Christopher Howard — October 29, 2014
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded the College Art Association (CAA) a $90,000 grant to partner with the Society for Architectural Historians (SAH) in the development of guidelines for the evaluation of digital scholarship in art and architectural history for promotion and tenure. CAA and SAH will convene a task force, hire a researcher to examine evaluative practices in departments of art and architectural history, develop a survey to seek current practices from CAA and SAH members, and provide evaluative guidelines. CAA President DeWitt Godfrey said, “Since its founding in 1911, CAA has regularly issued Standards and Guidelines for the fields of art and art history. These guidelines will encompass projects in art and architectural history that use digital technologies in research, production, publication, and/or exhibition. These growing forms of scholarship are in critical need of support and recognition, and this grant will allow CAA and SAH to provide standardized guidelines for those evaluating digital art and architectural history.”
This project will mark the first time that CAA and SAH will collaborate on professional practice guidelines, although the two associations have worked closely in other areas in the past. Pauline Saliga, SAH executive director announced, “The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to collaborate with our sister organization, the College Art Association, on this important endeavor. Because art and architectural historians are increasingly working collaboratively and using digital tools and data to construct their arguments, it is very important that we develop a set of guidelines for universities to recognize this innovative work.”
The ten-person task force will be chaired by CAA President DeWitt Godfrey and SAH President Ken Breisch. In addition to the chairs, the task force will comprise eight members with substantial experience in traditional and digital scholarship: two art historians, two architectural historians, a librarian, a museum curator, a scholar from another humanities or social-science field with expertise in digital scholarship, and a graduate student or emerging professional in art or architectural history.
The need for evaluative guidelines has been expressed by professors of art and architectural history who have developed research and/or publications using digital technologies, have created new digital tools for interpretation and understanding of art-historical and place-based subjects, or have collaborated with other scholars to develop digital archives and resources; by professors and administrators who have responsibility for dissertations and promotion and tenure committees but lack the necessary tools to assess digital scholarship; by CAA’s and SAH’s editorial boards and advisory committees, whose journals and online academic resources now require guidelines to facilitate critical reviews of digital scholarship; by CAA and SAH publication and award juries who need protocols for judging the quality of digital scholarship to determine awards; by academic publishers; and by other disciplines and their learned societies.
CAA and SAH anticipate that the guidelines will address different types of scholarly digital contributions: those that provide new resources, such as archives and new research tools (examples include SAH Archipedia and SAHARA); those that create scholarship in art and architectural history using publishing platforms such as Scalar and the JSTOR Current Scholarship program; those that create scholarship based on spatial and visualization technologies; and those that engage in new computational technologies.
CAA and SAH anticipate that shared guidelines will reassure art and architectural historians that new forms of digital research and scholarship will be evaluated and credentialed; provide tenure committees with specific criteria for evaluating digital projects in art and architectural history; and ensure that digital scholarship can be evaluated and supported through juries and grants, thereby increasing awareness and participation of scholars in the digital realm.
About CAA
The College Art Association is dedicated to providing professional services and resources for artists, art historians, and students in the visual arts. CAA serves as an advocate and a resource for individuals and institutions nationally and internationally by offering forums to discuss the latest developments in the visual arts and art history through its Annual Conference, publications, exhibitions, website, and other programs, services, and events. CAA focuses on a wide range of issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage, preservation, workforce topics in universities and museums, and access to networked information technologies. Representing its members’ professional needs since 1911, CAA is committed to the highest professional and ethical standards of scholarship, creativity, criticism, and teaching. Learn more at collegeart.org.
About SAH
Founded in 1940, the Society of Architectural Historians is a nonprofit membership organization that promotes the study, interpretation and conservation of architecture, design, landscapes and urbanism worldwide. SAH serves a network of local, national and international institutions and individuals who, by vocation or avocation, focus on the built environment and its role in shaping contemporary life. SAH promotes meaningful public engagement with the history of the built environment through advocacy efforts, print and online publications, and local, national and international programs. Learn more at sah.org.
For more information, please contact Hillary Bliss, CAA development and marketing manager, at hbliss@collegeart.org or 212-392-4436.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 22, 2014
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.
AIA Statement on the Recent Sale of Artifacts by the St. Louis Society
The Archaeological Institute of America has learned with grave concern that the AIA St. Louis Society has sold a collection of Egyptian artifacts entrusted to its care. These objects were intended to benefit the citizens of St. Louis by helping them to understand the record of past human achievement. The decision to sell these objects after a century of custodianship contravenes this expectation. (Read more from the Archaeological Institute of America.)
Publishers Win Reversal of Court Ruling That Favored “E-Reserves” at Georgia State University
How much copyrighted material can professors make available to students in online course reserves before they exceed the boundaries of educational fair use? That’s the essential question at the heart of a long-running copyright-infringement lawsuit that has pitted three academic publishers against Georgia State University. Last week, in a setback for the university, a federal appeals court reversed a May 2012 ruling that mostly favored Georgia State. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Nurturing Talent
Design education leaves designers lacking in business skills—it’s hard enough to learn to be a designer, but there needs to be a next step for the business side that caters to the entrepreneur. Who wants to spend two years getting an MBA if you’ve got a hot idea? We need a place where smart, talented designers can get an on-demand education about how to start a business, which includes everything from financial planning and costing to how to stay out of trouble. (Read more from Metropolis.)
“Looking” at Art in the Smartphone Age
“Beyoncé and Jay-Z Take Selfie with Mona Lisa!” headlines all over the internet blared. And it’s true, the first couple of American pop culture did take a photo of themselves in front of one of the masterpieces of European art history. But in the instantly iconic image, the two musicians aren’t even looking at the famous work of art that they knowingly appropriate. In fact, they have their backs turned to it, with the Mona Lisa’s face poking out over their shoulders like a photobomb across the centuries. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
Soft Fabrics Have Solid Appeal
Once dismissed as utilitarian, homespun, and intellectually flimsy, textiles are gaining international stature in art museums. The artist Richard Tuttle just unveiled a vast installation in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, called I Don’t Know, or the Weave of Textile Language, while new and older works are on view in his retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in east London. Meanwhile, there are shows on fiber art, weaving, and embroidery at the Drawing Center in New York and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Hanging a Tapestry in the Met Is a Lot More Complicated Than You Think
The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently opened a new exhibition: Grand Design, a collection featuring nineteen massive tapestries by the Renaissance master Pieter Coecke van Aelst. The tapestries are epic, intricate pieces, spanning up to thirty feet in length and weighing an average of one hundred pounds—which begs the question of how, exactly, the museum hangs them. (Read more from Slate.)
The Confidence Gap in Academic Writing
As a writing workshop instructor, I’ve become familiar with the garden-variety problems that graduate students face in writing a dissertation. Often those difficulties boil down to an avoidance of the daily grind of writing itself. Sometimes students lack any concrete feedback on their drafts or receive comments that are too general to be of much help in the revision process. Many students are unfamiliar with the tricks and tools of the writing trade itself—things like reverse outlines, free writing, or “storyboarding.” (Read more from Vitae.)
Managing Your Academic Career
In my ten years of interviewing and/or observing approximately one hundred faculty members at various types of institutions, I have learned a great deal about how to shape and manage academic work in ways that promote meaningful, balanced, and satisfying careers. To prepare for a presentation at new faculty orientation at Saint Joseph’s University, I reviewed the field notes, interview transcripts, and publications from my past studies with one question in mind: What strategies might best help new faculty members manage their academic careers during a time of rising expectations, decreasing resources, and diminishing boundaries between work and life? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 15, 2014
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.
Tax Court Ruling Is Seen as a Victory for Artists
If you say you are an artist, but you make little money from selling your art, can your work be considered a profession in the eyes of the Internal Revenue Service? In a ruling handed down in early October by the United States Tax Court and seen by many as an important victory for artists, the answer is yes. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Can the Monograph Survive?
The first four chapters prove the scholar’s done the work, and the next two chapters—the ones “people might actually read”—present the argument. Elsewhere and in between are the reworking of the author’s dissertation and implicit tenure pitch. That’s how Timothy Burke, professor and chair of history at Swarthmore College, described the scholarly monograph during a recent forum on its future sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
An Expert Cites Dozens of Paintings as Rembrandt’s
Are there suddenly dozens more genuine Rembrandts in the world? There are if art authorities accept the findings of Ernst van de Wetering, the Dutch art historian and longtime head of the Netherlands-based Rembrandt Research Project. In its sixth and final volume, published last week, van de Wetering reattributes seventy paintings—often discounted by previous scholars as well as the institutions that own them—to the Dutch master. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Bonfire of the Humanities
It has long been fashionable to say that the globe is shrinking. In the wake of the telegraph, the steamship, and the railway, thinkers from the late-nineteenth century onward often wrote of space and time being annihilated by new technologies. In our current age of jet travel and the internet, we often hear that the world is flat, and that we live in a global village. Time has also been compressed. In the 1980s, this myopic vision found a name: short-termism. (Read more from Aeon.)
Will My Nonacademic Writing Come Back to Haunt Me?
As a graduate student, I have published in nonacademic venues on the topic of parenting a special-needs child. Now I am concerned that this is going to come back to haunt me on the faculty job market. Some of my professors have pressured me to quit the graduate program, assuming I couldn’t manage academia and motherhood. I kept at it, and finished my degree, but will search committees secretly think the same thing as those professors? (Read more from Vitae.)
Warburg Institute Threatened by Funding Woes
The Warburg Institute here has trained generations of scholars, who liken its world-renowned library of Renaissance and post-Classical material to an intellectual paradise. Now many scholars fear for the Warburg’s future over a funding dispute with the University of London, which has housed the collection since 1944, after it was moved from Nazi Germany. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Tate and Oil: Does the Art World Need to Come Clean about Sponsorship?
In a cramped second-floor room in an office block mostly used for immigration hearings, one of the most famous museums in the world is fighting to keep a secret. In March, the Information Commissioner ruled that Tate must, against its wishes, reveal some of what was said in meetings where the latest of several sponsorship deals with oil giant BP was discussed. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Preventing a “Digital Landfill”
University libraries need to advocate for government openness and electronic record keeping, speakers during the Association of Research Libraries fall membership conference implored, or risk the digital landscape’s becoming a “digital landfill.” The call to action emerged from a day during which members of the association debated how libraries should involve themselves in producing accessible digital resources, managing institutional data, and supporting campus innovation. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 08, 2014
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.
Parody Copyright Laws Set to Come into Effect
Changes to legislation in the United Kingdom allowing the parody of copyright works are set to come into force. Under current rules, there has been a risk of being sued for breach of copyright if clips of films, TV shows, or songs were used without consent. But the new European Copyright Directive will allow the use of the material so long as it is fair and does not compete with the original version. (Read more from BBC News.)
How the UK’s New Copyright Law Benefits Libraries, Archives, and Museums
A suite of new copyright exceptions in the United Kingdom’s legislative framework will mean that infringements, such as format shifting for personal use of legitimately bought or gifted works, will be legitimized, and as a result, bad and impossible to police laws will finally be removed from the statute books. But the other beneficiaries of these important and in some cases, sweeping changes, will be libraries, archives, educational establishments, and museums. (Read more from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.)
Authors Guild vs. Google: Fair Use or Foul Play?
Google has digitized millions of books for its Google Books Library Project, a database that allows a user to search the content of all books that have been scanned into it. The Authors Guild maintains that the project constitutes mass copyright infringement, because Google did not obtain licenses from the rights holders for millions of the books. When the Authors Guild sued Google in the Southern District of New York for copyright infringement, Google prevailed via fair use. The Authors Guild has appealed the ruling to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case is pending and being briefed. The entertainment attorney Mark Robertson discussed the case with Jay Dougherty of Loyola Law School Los Angeles, where he is a professor of law. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)
Inquiry: Art Law and Attribution
The quest for compensation and probing legal investigations into how alleged Knoedler Gallery fraud could have happened has exposed the processes behind art sales, forcing the thorny issue of what should be the reasonable and reasoned business of authentication and attribution into the spotlight. However, recent years have seen many expert sources become increasingly wary of assisting in authentication processes, something that can be equated directly with the pressure of market value and the difficulties inherent in the process. (Read more from Apollo.)
JSTOR, Daily
Much of the world’s knowledge is contained in JSTOR, a vast digital academic library. But most of that content is behind a subscription wall. And if you’re not looking for something specific—or even if you are—attempting to take in all that knowledge can be an overwhelming experience. Wanting to make JSTOR’s content more digestible and to engage a different kind of audience, the library has launched a new online magazine, JSTOR Daily. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
For Adjuncts, a Lot Is Riding on Student Evaluations
In February 2012, Miranda Merklein received the email that many adjunct professors dread. “I am sorry to inform you that we cannot extend an employment offer to you at this time,” wrote a department chair at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, where Merklein had been teaching English and writing courses as an adjunct. “A review of your course evaluations, coupled with concerns filed by students and other contributing faculty, resulted in the decision to remove your application from the liberal arts adjunct pool.” At first, Merklein recalled, she was shocked. Then she got angry. (Read more from Vitae.)
An Open Letter to Journal Editors
I write to you today about the graduate-student submissions you receive. Most of you publish a lot of them. That’s because today’s students do first-rate work. Nonetheless, I’ve got an idea for you: What if you stopped publishing articles by doctoral students until they graduated? (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
What Is the Fair Market Value of a Museum Job?
Last week’s post on “The Museum Sacrifice Measure” generated much discussion on Twitter and Facebook and in the Center for the Future of Museum blog’s comment section. A number of commenters point out that various categories of people, in museums or other sectors, have “sacrificed” income for their chosen career but are quite pleased with the trade. (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
September Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — October 07, 2014
The opening essay of the September 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is by the Brazilan scholar Claudia Mattos, who examines local and global view on art history in “Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History.”
In other essays in the issue: Douglas Brine explores the memorializing function of Jan van Eyck’s van der Paele Virgin, with particular attention to its commissioning and original setting. Mitchell B. Merback considers the moral and phenomenological implications of a monstrous visage, reflected in the Centurion’s armor, in Hans Burgkmair’s Crucifixion in Augsburg. In “Watteau, Reverie, and Selfhood,” Aaron Wile finds that the French artist’s fêtes galantes establish a new relationship between painting and viewer, characterized by reverie and a modern sense of interiority. Finally, Rebecca Brown looks at the exhibitions associated with the 1985–86 Festival of India in the United States and how they isolated Indian art from broader movements in modern and contemporary art.
In the Reviews section, Matthew P. McKelway considers books by Alexander Hofmann and by Yukio Lippit on painting in early modern Japan. J. M. Mancini reviews Zahid R. Chaudhary’s Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, and Ebba Koch examines Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture.
CAA sends The Art Bulletin to all institutional members and to those individuals who choose to receive the journal as a benefit of their membership. The digital version at Taylor & Francis Online is currently available to all CAA individual members.
In the next issue of the quarterly journal, December 2014, Cheng-hua Wang offers a global perspective on eighteenth-century Chinese visual culture in “Whither Art History.” The feature essays offer new research and a reinterpretation of the Greek statue known as the Motya Youth, an analysis of two editions of a print series published in seventeenth-century Antwerp, an exploration of the Rococo revival in mid-nineteenth-century Austria, and a reading of Ad Reinhardt’s black square paintings as object lessons in Marxist dialectics. The issue will also include reviews on Maya art, color, and theories of visual culture.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — October 01, 2014
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 Academics Stink at Writing
Together with wearing earth tones, driving Priuses, and having a foreign policy, the most conspicuous trait of the American professoriate may be the prose style called academese. An editorial cartoon by Tom Toles shows a bearded academic at his desk offering the following explanation of why SAT verbal scores are at an all-time low: “Incomplete implementation of strategized programmatics designated to maximize acquisition of awareness and utilization of communications skills pursuant to standardized review and assessment of languaginal development.” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Always Talk to Strangers
I attended a conference recently and stayed at a hotel that required me to take a shuttle to get to my events. On my first shuttle ride back to the hotel, I chatted with another hotel guest who was attending a different conference and also not staying at his conference hotel. We chatted about a variety of things before we got to that pivotal point when I was very glad I chose this particular hotel. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
End the Conference Interview
Why is it so hard to kill off the tradition of conference interviews? For decades, search committees in many fields have been holding first-round interviews at the annual meetings of their disciplinary organizations. That means the poorest and most vulnerable members of our profession—graduate students, adjuncts, and fixed-term appointees—have to spend a minimum of $1,000 just to get a shot at the next round. No one would call that a just system, and yet, it lives on. (Read more from Vitae.)
Fight over DIA Value Resumes in Court
When Detroit’s bankruptcy trial restarts, the battle over the value of the Detroit Institute of Arts will return to center stage. The city’s largest holdout creditor, the bond insurer Financial Guaranty Insurance Co., is betting its case against the city’s so-called grand bargain on the premise that the city-owned DIA is worth billions more than the Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is willing to admit. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)
Millennials and Museums: Oil and Water?
It’s not enough to rely on the “intrinsic awesomeness” of your collections. If I don’t know about them, they don’t exist. In fact, even if I do know about them, that’s probably not enough to get me to come. Where do my priorities lie? Well, I’m trying to save money, I like to socialize and blow off steam with my friends, we like concerts and cocktails, to see art and go dancing. So, what can you offer me? (Read more from the Tronvig Group.)
The Museum Sacrifice Measure
How much are you willing to give up to work in a museum? How much did you give up to work in a museum? I’m not talking about quality of life issues such as relocating to a new city, having to explain over and over again, at parties, what a “registrar” is, or spending the day in a windowless cubicle tucked in next to collections storage. I’m talking about cold hard cash. (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
On the False Democracy of Contemporary Art
Art claims that it expands into the sphere of social transformation and genuine democracy. Yet paradoxically, art’s ambition for direct social engagement and its self-abandonment loop back to the very territory of contemporary art, its archive machine, and its self-referential rhetoric of historicizing. Hence the question is: Are we really witnessing the anticapitalist transformation that excuses art’s self-sublation and its dissolution in newly transformed life? (Read more from e-flux Journal.)
Something Old, Something New
The National Endowment for the Humanities has a new home and a new chairman, but the agency’s work to fund digital humanities projects continues unabated. The NEH Digital Humanities Project Directors Meeting was recently hosted for the eighth time in Washington, but for the first time in the agency’s new premises in the recently renovated Constitution Center. The event brings together grant recipients of the Office of Digital Humanities, the grant-making arm of the agency. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 24, 2014
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.
Detroit Institute of Arts Will Sue If the City’s Bankruptcy Plan Is Not Approved
The Detroit Institute of Arts is prepared to sue to prevent the sale of its collection if Detroit’s plan for exiting bankruptcy is not approved, the museum’s chief operating officer told the US Bankruptcy Court last week. When Detroit filed for the largest-ever municipal bankruptcy fourteen months ago, the museum began preparing for possible litigation to keep its artworks from being sold to pay city creditors. (Read more from Reuters.)
What to Expect from Artist Residencies
Artist residencies can be an incredible way to expand and improve your art practice, but getting into the right one can be a challenge. I’ve completed residency programs in 2012, 2013, and 2014. Through this process, I’ve learned how to pick the right residency and how to use one residency experience to gain another. Here’s my advice for anyone wishing to dive into the artist residency circuit. (Read more from BurnAway.)
Artists Raising Kids: Thoughts on How to Have It All
This summer, Creative Capital conducted a survey entitled “Artists-As-Parents” to find out how working artists sustain their practice while also being busy parents (or prepare themselves to do so as parents-to-be). We received nearly six hundred responses, giving us a good idea of the profile of artist-parents in our network, the challenges they face, and the strategies they use to maximize their time and productivity. (Read more from Creative Capital.)
Scholars Take Aim at Student Evaluations’ “Air of Objectivity”
Student course evaluations are often misused statistically and shed little light on the quality of teaching, two scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, argue in the draft of a new paper. Even though evaluations have become ubiquitous in academe, they remain controversial because they often assume a high-stakes role in determining tenure and promotion. But they persist because they are easy to produce, administer, and tabulate, said Philip B. Stark, a professor of statistics at Berkeley, in an interview. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
We Asked Twenty Women “Is the Art World Biased?” Here’s What They Said
Artnet News has noticed that bias, both conscious and unconscious, is rampant throughout the world. It’s in the umpteenth exhibition not featuring a woman. It’s in the evening auction whose top winners are male. It’s in art schools the world over, germinating and putting down roots. What to do? We canvassed women collectors, dealers, curators, advisers, and artists to find out their responses to the question “Is the art world biased?” (Read more from Artnet News.)
Why Original Artworks Move Us More Than Reproductions
Now that we can view high-definition reproductions of virtually any artwork from our computer screens, why do people visit art museums anyway? Sure, arranging individual pieces into compelling exhibitions enhances our appreciation, but it’s doubtful that people come for the curation. Clearly, encountering original artworks in person is a unique experience. But why? (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
Who Funds the Arts and Why We Should Care
Anyone passing through Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall one recent Saturday might have witnessed an unscheduled performance by a group of people writhing beneath a huge square of black cloth. Taking its motif from the Malevich exhibition at Tate, the event was designed to flag the museum’s refusal to reveal details of its financial relationship with BP. It was the latest in a series of protests about the sponsorship of institutions—among them the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery—by the energy giant responsible for the Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010. (Read more from the Financial Times.)
Crimes against Dissertation Humanities
Since I left academia in 2013, I’ve had a part-time job as something called a “dissertation coach.” I work one-on-one with a stable of about a dozen private clients, helping them manage both their workload and the emotional vicissitudes of graduate school. And no matter their field—I’ve worked with scientists, engineers, sociologists, psychologists, historians, and literary scholars—one thing remains the same: my services simply would not be necessary if the faculty advisers of the world saw fit to do their jobs. (Read more from Vitae.)