CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 17, 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.
Introduction to 2012–13 Humanities Departmental Survey
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences initiated the Humanities Departmental Survey, first administered in 2008, to fill critical gaps in knowledge about the state of the humanities in higher education—specifically, about the number of faculty and students in the field and the role of humanities departments in their institutions and society. Apart from trends in the number of students receiving degrees in humanities disciplines, data sources about the state of the humanities at the national level have fallen away over the past fifteen years, leaving decision-makers without key guideposts during a time of change in higher education. (Read more from Humanities Indicators.)
On Trigger Warnings
A current threat to academic freedom in the classroom comes from a demand that teachers provide warnings in advance if assigned material contains anything that might trigger difficult emotional responses for students. This follows from earlier calls not to offend students’ sensibilities by introducing material that challenges their values and beliefs. The specific call for “trigger warnings” began in the blogosphere as a caution about graphic descriptions of rape on feminist sites, and has now migrated to university campuses in the form of requirements or proposals that students be alerted to all manner of topics that some believe may deeply offend and even set off a PTSD response in some individuals. (Read more from the American Association of University Professors.)
Creative Schools: The Artists Taking Art Education into Their Own Hands
Several artists and arts professionals, spotting the same or similar failures in the UK’s official education programs at both schools and universities, have taken matters into their own hands. If the government’s curriculum changes, funding cuts, and fees are barring the way to education for many aspiring artists, independent initiatives might offer alternative routes into the creative industry. Who’s leading the way? (Read more from Apollo.)
Getting a Reference When You’re New
I just graduated with my PhD and am beginning my job as a one-year visiting assistant professor this fall. My first applications for this year’s job market are due about two weeks after the semester starts; most applications will be due by midterm. Will hiring committees be expecting a recommendation from my new colleagues? I don’t think they would be able to write a strong letter after knowing me for a month, but I also don’t want the lack of letters to throw up any red flags. (Read more from Vitae.)
Peer Review and Careers
I have no doubt that the humanities disciplines are, on the whole, the worst offenders when it comes to how long it takes to generate reader reports, and to move an article from an initial submission to a finished, published product. If it can take two years to publish humanities research in some traditional, print-based journals—and I’m talking articles here, not books—that lag makes it harder than ever to defend the project of humanities disciplines. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Hidden Monuments under Stonehenge Revealed by High-Tech Mapping
An astonishing complex of ancient monuments, buildings, and barrows has lain hidden and unsuspected beneath the Stonehenge area for thousands of years. Scientists discovered the site using sophisticated techniques to see underground, announcing the finds last week. Among the discoveries are seventeen ritual monuments, including the remains of a massive “house of the dead,” hundreds of burial mounds, and evidence of a possible processional route around Stonehenge itself. (Read more from National Geographic.)
How Okwui Enwezor Changed the Art World
Since his 1996 breakthrough as a curator of In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to Present, an exhibition of thirty African photographers at the Guggenheim Museum, Okwui Enwezor has alternated between ambitious international exhibitions that seek to define their moment—biennials in Johannesburg, Gwangju, and beyond, along with the Paris Triennale in 2012—and historically driven, encyclopedic museum shows centered on topics such as African liberation movements in the twentieth century, the arc of apartheid, and the use of archive material in contemporary art. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
Apply Now for Sustaining Digital Resources: A Course for Digital Project Leaders
Ithaka S+R will again offer its highly successful course, “Sustaining Digital Resources: A Course for Digital Project Leaders,” in 2015. If you are responsible for the future vitality and impact of a digital initiative, Ithaka S+R encourages you to apply. The application deadline is October 15, 2014. (Read more from Ithaka S+R.)
Overview of Findings from the 2012–13 Humanities Departmental Survey
posted by Christopher Howard — September 10, 2014
Humanities Indicators, a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has released the findings from its 2012–13 Humanities Departmental Survey. The report says:
Despite considerable discussion in the media about the impact of the recent recession on academia in general and the humanities in particular, the results from the Humanities Departmental Survey (HDS-2) suggest considerable continuity between the 2007–08 and 2012–13 academic years—bearing in mind that we are only seeing snapshots from two moments in time. Among the degree-granting departments surveyed for both HDS-1 and HDS-2 (in art history, English, languages and literatures other than English, history, history of science, linguistics, combined languages and literatures programs, and religion at four-year institutions) the number of existing departments and faculty appeared relatively unchanged, though the number of students majoring in the humanities slipped.
You can read an overview of the report, as well as breakdowns on individual disciplines—including art history—on the Humanities Indicators website.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 10, 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.
Tenure-Track Wisdom, Part One
Here is the first in a series of interviews with faculty who recently finished their first year on the tenure track. By reading about their experiences, new faculty members starting out this fall may get a better sense of what to expect. Today we hear from Sam Redman, who just finished his first year as an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he is also a faculty affiliate with the university’s Center for Heritage and Society. (Read more from Vitae.)
What Twitter Changes Might Mean for Academics
Time-based organization works really well for many popular academic uses of Twitter—particularly conferences, where it’s easy to find an interesting panel or meet-up in the moment, while the rest of the timeline becomes one historical record of the conference interactions. However, it’s precisely the timeline that may be at risk. (Read more from ProfHacker.)
Who and What Is Arts Education For?
We may consider art as a way of thinking, acquiring, and ordering knowledge with a boundless use of our imagination, as a way to make connections, and as a tool for subverting conventions in order to refresh and shape culture and improve society. “Art thinking” can be viewed as speculation based on wonder, free of dogma, not discarding anything except the overly obvious and trivial. Even chaos is part of this totality: nonlogical, nonlinear connections may be used as much as logical ones, and everything is available when seeking to construct new systems of order. (Read more from Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.)
UK Art Dealers Are Dodging Artist Resale Rights
The Artist Resale Right (ARR) might have been introduced in 2006, but many dealers in the United Kingdom are still choosing to treat this legal obligation as optional. “It’s still a big problem,” said Leonora Gummer, a senior manager at the Artist Collecting Society, one of two nonprofits dedicated to collecting ARR. “I still meet dealers, quite often, who say: ‘I’m not going to [pay].’” Gummer spoke alongside the lawyer Simon Stokes at a recent panel chaired by the Antiques Trade Gazette editor Ivan Macquisten at London’s inaugural Art Business Conference. (Read more from Artnet News.)
The Law against Artists: Public Art Often Loses Out in Court
When artists faced the destruction of New York’s graffiti mecca, Long Island City’s 5 Pointz, last year, they sued the property owner under something called the Visual Artists Rights Act. They lost. In part, they lost because a judge ruled that while the artists had been permitted to decorate the space, they “knew that the buildings were coming down.” They therefore couldn’t have expected that their work would be permanent. (Read more from the New York Observer.)
Creativity Creep
Every culture elects some central virtues, and creativity is one of ours. In fact, right now, we’re living through a creativity boom. Few qualities are more sought after, few skills more envied. Everyone wants to be more creative—how else, we think, can we become fully realized people? Creativity is now a literary genre unto itself: every year, more and more creativity books promise to teach creativity to the uncreative. A tower of them has risen on my desk—Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace’s Creativity, Inc.; Philip Petit’s Creativity: The Perfect Crime—each aiming to “unleash,” “unblock,” or “start the flow” of creativity at home, in the arts, or at work. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Face It: Your Decks Will Never Be Cleared
One of the most widespread myths in academic writing is that you can, and should, try to “clear the decks”—that is, finish all of your other obligations before you can focus on your scholarship. The reality is: things never clear up. They don’t even reliably settle down. Your inbox is always full. The decks are always crowded. There is always more going on than you want or expect. Nonetheless, you can find ways to put your writing first and make sure that it gets done. Otherwise, everything but your writing will get done. (Read more from Vitae.)
To Help Emerging Artists, Let Collectors Resell Their Work
The art market is hot again, even for emerging artists—the typically hard-to-price, who-knows-where-this-is-headed group of young, living creators. At Phillips’s last Under the Influence auction, almost all of the work sold, much of it for double the estimated price or higher. This and other sales have generated reports of overheating, irrational exuberance due for a correction. Like some of the art market itself, such reports may be victims of their own hype. (Read more from Bloomberg Businessweek.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 03, 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.
Who’s Getting Tenure-Track Jobs? It’s Time to Find Out
As the academic labor market turns grimmer and tenure-track professorships become scarcer, it’s hard not to wonder: Who’s getting hired to the desperately coveted positions that remain? It’s a question with serious implications, both for the academy and for the hordes of job-seeking scholars. Yet it’s been over a decade since anyone made much of an effort to come up with an answer—to find the names of the fortunate and talented few, across disciplines, and put them all in one place. (Read more from Vitae.)
What They Never Told You about Consigning Your Art
Art consignment agreements are deceptively simple. This essay goes behind that simplicity to raise issues for art owners that are not fully addressed—or only imperfectly so—by the text of the usual agreement. Rescission by the auction house (undoing the sale long after the auction) is one of these issues. There are others. (Read more from Spencer’s Art Law Journal.)
Court Sides with University of Missouri in Fight over Teacher-Prep Syllabi
A state appeals court has ruled that the University of Missouri system does not have to release course syllabi, as they are the intellectual property of the faculty and therefore exempt from the state’s open-records law, the Columbia Daily Tribune reports. The decision, handed down last week, is the latest chapter in a bid by the National Council on Teacher Quality to rank teacher-preparation programs by obtaining course syllabi and other materials from institutions nationwide. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
The Upside of Art School
Art school is an easy and enjoyable target for satire and jokes. Most everyone I know has had some of the kind of experiences that fall into the way art school is usually portrayed—I’ve even brought a list of those bad stories to Daniel Clowes, and a couple from my wife Linda were in the movie Art School Confidential. But I also had a many good experiences in art school, some with caring teachers who shared insights that have made a lasting impact on me. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
Fate of Detroit’s Art Hangs in the Balance as Bankruptcy Trial Begins
This week a bankruptcy trial to determine the future of the city of Detroit began after more than a year of negotiations—and the fate of the Detroit Institute of Arts hangs in the balance. The resolution of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history is likely to set precedents for other struggling cities. At the center of the conflict is whether a bankrupt city can avoid selling any valuable asset, including its art collection. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Academics and Archaeologists Fight to Save Syria’s Artifacts
The upheavals and conflicts sweeping the Middle East in recent years have caused untold human suffering and have resulted in deep losses to the heritage of the region. Scholars can do little to stop the fighting and looting, but they have created blogs, websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts to monitor the destruction and raise awareness about it. By sharing excavation records, scholars outside the Middle East have helped their counterparts in the Arab world to compile online lists of missing or stolen objects. (Read more from the New York Times.)
The Elusiveness of Stolen Art
Earlier this month thieves made off with a giant Renaissance masterpiece: a 10 x 6 feet piece painted by Guercino in 1639 and worth over $8 million. Whoever took the painting didn’t have to do much; the security alarm on the church wasn’t working, and according to the Telegraph the church that housed the painting didn’t have the money to get it fixed. Once a work of art leaves a museum or church, the chances of getting it back are extraordinarily slim. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Should I Explain Why I’m Leaving?
I just finished my second year in my position as an assistant professor, and I’m going back on the market next year. My university is broke, and I have been very productive and outperformed my current position. Do I mention that in my cover letter? I like my colleagues and get along well with everyone, so I don’t want people reading my letter to think I’m leaving because I am hard to work with. So do I explain why I want to leave? (Read more from Vitae.)
New Publication Grants for Manuscripts on American Art
posted by Christopher Howard — September 03, 2014
The Terra Foundation for American Art has awarded CAA a major, three-year grant to administer an annual grant program to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art. The Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant will award funds of up to $15,000 for books that examine American art in an international context, increase awareness of American art internationally through publication outside the United States, allow wider audiences to access important texts through translation, and/or result from international collaboration. The program is designed to offset image acquisition and translation costs, however other editing and production expenses will be considered.
The publication grants will support publications that make significant contributions to the field in three award categories: grants to US publishers for manuscripts that consider American art in an international context, grants to non-US publishers for books on topics in American art, and grants for the translation of books on topics in American art to or from English. In addition to the publication grants, the program will support the creation of an international network of American art scholars by providing two non-US authors whose books are funded through the grant program with travel stipends and complimentary registration to attend CAA’s Annual Conference.
Grant guidelines, detailed eligibility requirements, and application instructions are available on the CAA website. For this grant program, “American art” is defined as art (circa 1500–1980) of what is now the geographic United States. Letters of inquiry should be submitted to CAA no later than October 15, 2014. Applicants whose projects fall within the guidelines and successfully fulfill the mission of the grant program will be invited to submit full applications, due December 15, 2014. The first round of award winners will be announced in April 2015.
About CAA
CAA 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 advocacy issues, including education in the arts, freedom of expression, intellectual-property rights, cultural heritage and 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.
About the Terra Foundation
The Terra Foundation for American Art is dedicated to fostering exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States for national and international audiences. Recognizing the importance of experiencing original works of art, the foundation provides opportunities for interaction and study, beginning with the presentation and growth of its own art collection in Chicago. To further cross-cultural dialogue on American art, the foundation supports and collaborates on innovative exhibitions, research, and educational programs. Implicit in such activities is the belief that art has the potential both to distinguish cultures and to unite them.
Contact
For more information please contact Hillary Bliss, CAA development and marketing manager, at hbliss@collegeart.org or 212-392-4436. For more information on applying to the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant, please contact Betty Leigh Hutcheson, CAA director of publications, at bhutcheson@collegeart.org or 212-392-4417.
Image: Asher B. Durand, Kindred Spirits, 1849, oil on canvas, 44 x 36 in. (artwork in the public domain)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — August 27, 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.
From the Archives: The First Week of the Academic Term
The ProfHacker archives are full of useful ideas, tools, and advice relevant to the first week of a new academic semester or quarter. In addition to the posts highlighted below, you may want to check out some previous From the archives posts on New Semester, New Year, Creating Syllabi, and Grading. (Read more from ProfHacker.)
Sabbatical Planning
A sabbatical was finally mine, but now what? I read as much as I could find, and contacted colleagues who had recently ended their sabbaticals for advice. Their accumulated advice roughly fell into the familiar set of questions, albeit in a different order: the Why, What, Who, Where, How and When of sabbatical. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Ethics for Dealers: Deaccessioning
If someone helps another person commit a crime, he’s an accessory to the illegal act and probably guilty of an infraction. What about an ethical violation? The question is becoming increasingly relevant in the art world as the Delaware Art Museum deaccessions works of art to pay off its debt and, as first conceived, built up its endowment. (Read more from Art Antiques Design.)
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Released as Linked Open Data
The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is a resource of over 2 million names of current and historical places, including cities, archaeological sites, nations, and physical features. It focuses mainly on places relevant to art, architecture, archaeology, art conservation, and related fields. (Read more from Getty Iris.)
The Free and Antifree
For a young writer who hopes to produce literature, the greatest difference between now and twenty years ago may be that now she expects to get paid. Twenty years ago, art and commerce appeared to be opposing forces. The more you were paid for your work, the more likely you were to be a hack. (Read more from N+1.)
More Hospitals Use the Healing Powers of Art
Researchers are learning more about the precise ways paintings and other works of art help patients and families in the healing process. With studies showing a direct link between the content of images and the brain’s reaction to pain, stress, and anxiety, hospitals are considering and choosing artworks based on the evidence and giving it a higher priority than merely decoration for sterile rooms and corridors. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)
I Used to Be a Good Teacher
I spent five years on the tenure track. Now I’m an adjunct, and the move has affected my teaching in ways I didn’t anticipate. I’m not the teacher I once was, largely thanks to the lack of support I receive as an adjunct. Sadly, my students suffer the loss. (Read more from Vitae.)
The Invention of the “Snapshot” Changed the Way We Viewed the World
The age of everyday camera drones has arrived—bringing strange new forms of photography—and they’re causing new privacy panics. How will society change when anyone can spy from above? We can find some clues by looking at the last great shift in photography: the rise of the personal camera and the birth of the “snapshot.” It was a moment that changed the way we recorded the world. (Read more from Smithsonian Magazine.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — August 20, 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.
Almanac of Higher Education 2014
The Chronicle’s twenty-seventh annual collection of data on colleges answers perennial questions like how much faculty make and which colleges are growing the fastest. This year’s almanac also gives you new ways to compare institutions. Which colleges have the most students enrolled in online courses? Which have the highest percentages of nonresident aliens? Browse the charts and tables in these sections to find out. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Starting Over, Part 1
First, congratulations. You got a job, which isn’t easy to do these days. I know you’re probably very stressed out right now. I’ve felt that way four times. I have written elsewhere of my academic employment history, but suffice it to say, yes: four tenure-track jobs, four cross-country moves, four universities, four times I’ve started from scratch. So, here’s my hard-earned advice about adjusting to a new place, managing your expectations, and getting what you really want. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Starting Over, Part 2
In the first part of this essay on tips for professors on starting over at a new college, I offered advice on seeking mentors, changing your thinking from your grad school days, and “thinking like a lawyer.” Here’s my second batch of hard-earned advice (from my multiple job changes) about adjusting to a new place, managing your expectations, and getting what you really want. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
How to Write an Honest but Collegial Book Review
I have agreed to write a book review, and I’m frankly not sure how to proceed. My advisor, who invited me to write it, is not a fan of this particular author and will expect a critical review. But the author, as someone who works in my area, is a possible contact/future colleague, and I don’t want to alienate him by writing a scathing review. Is there some formula to follow for writing book reviews? Do you have any tips for writing a critical review that doesn’t shred the book? (Read more from Vitae.)
Beyond the Relic Cult of Art
I am nostalgic for a time before the modern concept of art forgery had gelled, when it was possible to imagine many ways for artworks to exist out of their time. I love the culture of Renaissance art because it was not settled in its categories, and produced art out of that unsettlement. It knew forgery, but it wrinkled time in other ways as well. (Read more from the Brooklyn Rail.)
Digitizing Warhol’s Film Trove to Save It
Andy Warhol wrote lovingly of his ever-present tape recorder. But for almost a decade beginning in the 1960s, his real boon companions seemed to be his 16mm film cameras, which he used to record hundreds of reels, many of which are still little known even among scholars because of the fragility of the film and the scarcity of projectors to show them on. Now the Warhol Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, which holds the artist’s film archives, are beginning a project to digitize the materials. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Rethinking My Cell Phone/Computer Policy
My banning of cell phones and laptops, particularly the way I articulate it as a “ban” in my policies, suddenly seemed inconsistent with my own philosophies. And yet, I still don’t want students habitually using their phones or computers in class, unless we are in the midst of an activity—such as database research—that is obviously facilitated by their computers. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Camera Phones Stoke Fears That Technology Is Leaving Us Incapable of Deep Engagement with Anything
How long do you need to look at a painting to really appreciate it? There are many answers to this question. As long as you like, is one. Longer than you think, is another. The art historian James Elkins wrote that it took him about 100 hours, over three years, to learn to really see a Mondrian painting. He recounts meeting a woman who had spent an hour looking at the same Rembrandt work four times a week for at least two decades—or about 3,000 hours. (Read more from the Independent.)
Art History Teaching Resources Seeks Lesson Plans
posted by Christopher Howard — August 14, 2014
Do you have a great lesson plan you want to take some time to codify and share? Funded by a Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant for digital resources, Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR), a peer-populated platform for instructors and a collectively authored online repository of art-history teaching content, seeks contributors for specific subject areas in the art-history survey. This is the second call for participation (the first went out in early 2014).
AHTR is particularly interested the following sections in art and architecture for publication in early fall 2014:
- Jewish and Early Christian Art and Architecture
- Byzantine Art and Architecture
- Islamic Art and Architecture
- Chinese Art and Architecture (early/pre-1279)
- Chinese Art and Architecture (after 1279)
- Japanese Art and Architecture (early)
- Japanese Art and Architecture (modern)
- Korean Art (early)
- Korean Art and Architecture (modern)
- Art and Architecture of Africa
- Early Medieval Art in Europe
- Romanesque Art and Architecture
- Gothic Art and Architecture
- Art of Pacific Cultures
- Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Art in Europe and North America
- Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Sculpture
- Twentieth-Century Sculpture
AHTR is also interested in receiving proposals for thematic art-history survey lesson plans. The editors have already received plans that engage with, for example, “Race and Identity” and “Transnationalism and Citizenship.” Please propose a thematic plan germane to the survey-level class.
For each content area, AHTR seeks lecture and lesson plans similar to those developed for its sections on the Americas (pre-1300) and Feminist Art. (Please see a great example here.) Full template guidelines will be given for the sections to be included in each plan; writers will be expected to review and amend their plan (if necessary), once edited by AHTR. These plans, which will be posted to the AHTR website in fall 2014, are supported by $250 writing grants made possible by the Kress award.
AHTR is looking for contributors who:
- Have strong experience teaching the art-history survey and strong interest in developing thoughtful, clear, and detailed lesson plans in particular subject areas
- Are committed to delivering lecture content (plan, PowerPoint, resources, activities) for one to two (a maximum of two) content areas in a timely manner. Each content area will be supported by a $250 Kress writing grant.
- Are able to make a September deadline for submission and an early October deadline for any edits.
- Want to engage with a community of peers in conversations about issues in teaching the art-history survey
AHTR’s intention is to offer monetary support for the often-unrewarded task of developing thoughtful lesson plans, to make this work freely accessible (and thus scalable), and to encourage feedback on them so that the website’s content can constantly evolve in tandem with the innovations and best practices in the field. In this way, AHTR wants to encourage new collaborators to the site—both emerging and experienced instructors in art history—who will enhance and expand teaching content. It also wishes to honor the production of pedagogical content at the university level by offering modest fellowships to support digital means of collaboration among art historians.
Please submit a short, teaching-centered CV and a brief statement of interest that describes which subject area(s) you wish to tackle to teachingarthistorysurvey@gmail.com. These initial texts should be delivered to AHTR in September 2014. Collaboration on content for further subject areas will be solicited throughout 2014.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — August 13, 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.
Museum under Fire for Selling Its Art
If the Delaware Art Museum has a signature painting, surely it is Howard Pyle’s Marooned (1909), which shows a pirate near death, curled up on a sand bar, a tiny figure enveloped by a burning yellow sky. The painting refers to the old custom of punishing insubordinates by shoving them off a ship and onto an island. But these days, you can also view Marooned as a curiously precise description of the museum, which has been ostracized by its peers. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Writing the Book on Reinventing the Book
Over more than five centuries, books have evolved from collections of folded and gathered pages bound between covers to collections of screens connected to a digital cloud. Yet despite the rise in tablet and ebook usage, print persists. Advocates of hard copy continue to make physical books that fill what few bookstores remain. In other words, the state of books today is multifaceted. How can someone possibly make predictions about the future of books? (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Know the Vital Players in Your Career: You
In more than twenty years of working in academe, I have seen innumerable people sabotage their own careers through terrible mistakes. A bad outcome is sometimes due to chance or forces beyond your control, but the single most important factor determining whether you achieve your career goals, including tenure and promotion, is you. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Giving Up the Good
Normally I’d be designing a syllabus right now. I’d be waiting to receive my finalized teaching schedule and telling interested students that they will learn which sections are mine as soon as I do. I’d be going over annotated texts to refresh my memory on topics for the first few weeks of class discussion. But none of that is happening this year. It’s not happening because I’m not teaching. Spring semester was my final term in the classroom as an adjunct. (Read more from Vitae.)
Tenure at Small Colleges
Advice on how to earn tenure usually focuses on what one would expect: teaching, scholarship, and service. Much of this advice is geared toward faculty who work at research-focused institutions. Generic advice columns about earning tenure and promotion offer some useful tips but often fail to capture the nature of faculty work and expectation so often found at small liberal-arts colleges, whose nature of faculty work is different from that at research-focused institutions. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Shared Shelf Commons Now Offers More Than 100,000 Free Files
The number of free images and video in Shared Shelf Commons, an open-access library of digital media, has now topped 100,000. The files come from institutions that subscribe to Shared Shelf, Artstor’s web-based service for cataloging and managing digital collections. (Read more from Artstor Blog.)
Socially Engaged Arts Undervalued, Say Practitioners
The majority of socially engaged arts practitioners feel their work is not valued by the sector as a whole and that there is not enough understanding of its benefits, a new survey has shown. The Paul Hamlyn Foundation’s ArtWorks Evaluation Survey of Artists also reveals that artists working in community, participatory, and socially engaged settings rely heavily on informal training, with codes of practice and standards neglected by employers, commissioners, and artists alike. (Read more from Arts Professional.)
Museums See Different Virtues in Virtual Worlds
This is an account about how two New York museums seized this dream—and how one of them clings to it still, while the other has found that the internet’s true value isn’t in being everywhere but in enhancing the here. They are the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum, both ambitious cosmopolitan art institutions but with rather different reputations: the Met an isle in the global archipelago of leading museums, the Brooklyn Museum more rooted in local soil. Yet, for all their differences, they shared a world-conquering dream some years ago. (Read more from the New York Times.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — August 06, 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.
Help Desk: Race and Voice
I am a writer and curator. I’m also a woman of color. How do I tell an editor that I’m entitled to my opinion—even if it brings up issues of race, gender, and identity—without being pegged as the “angry brown woman”? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
How to Avoid Being Published
I enjoyed Maureen Pirog’s recent piece “How to Get Published,” which is filled with common sense and good advice. Back in 2009, I too posted some publishing tips. I wish I could report that things have gotten better since then, but alas, from what I’ve observed with several journals, magazines, and newspapers with which I’m associated, writing in the humanities remains dire. Want to avoid being published? Here’s how. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Is Deskilling Killing Your Arts Education?
In 1974, when I was a freshman art student at a small liberal-arts college in Wisconsin, I wanted to learn to draw the human figure. One untenured professor took me under his wing and encouraged that process, but the department chair, an alcoholic abstract painter, stumbled into the studio late one evening while I was studying a plaster head that showed the muscles of the face. He slowly looked at me, then at the head. “This is not art!” he screamed, lifting the cast high and smashing it on the cement at his feet. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
The Copyright Office’s Recent Fee Changes
For the first time since 2009, the US Copyright Office instituted a number of fee changes that took effect on May 1, 2014. For a standard registration, the Copyright Office increased the online application fee from $35 to $55 and raised the paper application fee from $65 to $85. The office stated that these increases will allow it to recover a larger percentage of its costs. (Read more from the Center for Art Law.)
Tate Will Put Women Artists First and Foremost
Women artists come to the fore next year at Tate with shows devoted to Sonia Delaunay, Agnes Martin, Barbara Hepworth, and Marlene Dumas. The first retrospective in the United Kingdom dedicated to the French avant-garde artist Delaunay is due to open in spring 2015 at Tate Modern. Delaunay, who produced several large-scale mural paintings for the 1937 Paris International Exhibition with her husband Robert, is known for her vividly colored textiles emblazoned with striking geometrics. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Why Advertise Research Jobs If You’ve Already Picked Your Winner?
Coming to the end of yet another fixed-term research contract, it was time to start applying for my next one. I was lucky this time: my senior colleagues had just won a large grant, and one of the research assistant jobs was perfect for me. I applied and was offered the position. Great! But it’s not really that great, because the principal investigator had all but offered me the job in advance. The other fifty-plus applicants didn’t really stand a chance. (Read more from the Guardian.)
The Peer-Review Jerk Survival Guide
My academic friends, unless you’re part of a peer-review fraud syndicate, you will almost certainly have to deal with a jerky reader’s report. It might make you cry. It might make you get into a car accident. It might launch into a perplexing and irrelevant tirade about how using the digitized version of a Library of Congress source (rather than, presumably, traveling to the District of Columbia with all of your spare money) is a signifier of “scholarly sloth.” It may make you want to punch through a wall. (Read more from Vitae.)
How to be Supportive of an Artist
My sister is an artist. She’s really talented and I try to help and support her as much as possible by creating a peaceful and quiet environment for her to work in and by letting her know about gallery and museum exhibits or networking opportunities. It seem like whatever I do annoys her. What am I doing wrong? (Read more from KCET.)