CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — July 30, 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.
Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities at Universities and Research Institutes in the US and Germany
The Volkswagen Foundation aims to strengthen transatlantic academic relations, especially in the field of the humanities, via a funding initiative called Postdoctoral Fellowships in the Humanities at Universities and Research Institutes in Germany and the USA. For this project, Volkswagen will work closely with the New York–based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. (Read more from Volkswagen Stiftung.)
Report for Detroit Creditor Nearly Doubles Value of DIA Collection at $8.5 Billion
A new report analyzing the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts almost doubles the previous estimates of what the works are worth, putting their value at $8.5 billion. The new fifty-page assessment, a copy of which was obtained by the Detroit News, was prepared in just two weeks by the appraiser Victor Wiener of New York’s Victor Wiener Associates. (Read more from the Detroit News.)
Fame, Fortune, and the Female Artist
I have collected art, and been involved with artists and the art world, for almost fifty years. Through all that time, I have wondered why female artists have less success, fewer exhibitions, and less attention than male artists. I own works by women artists; it is hard for me to see, literally to see, how women and men differ in the quality of their work. Why are women artists less known and less admired? (Read more from the Huffington Post.)
Vernacular Criticism
Yelp does a lot of things, including a number of things that make people hate it. But one thing it does is provide a platform for vernacular art criticism, a different kind of writing about art and the public spaces where it is seen. Vernacular criticism can reject the guidelines set by cultivated artistic tastes, or it can guilelessly speak in ignorance of them, or in its naïve fascination with them can inadvertently expose their falseness. (Read more from the New Inquiry.)
Are MFAs Ruining Art?
This summer has seen another bumper year of MA and MFA students. As ever, the work coming from international art schools is good, bad, and everywhere in between. There is also an increasing professionalization of the artists coming from the academic system. Degree-show presentations can resemble solo booths at art fairs. Often the work presented is ready to slip immediately into the gallery system. The question remains: Is this a good thing? (Read more from Artsy.)
Spotting a Bad Adviser—and How to Pick a Good One
Universities have a lot of names for the professor who works with a graduate student on a thesis or dissertation and later signs off on it. The main titles are “adviser,” “director,” and, more rarely, “sponsor.” Some universities, including my own, call a professor in this position a “mentor.” I like “adviser” because I think that’s the best description of the job when it’s being done well. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Low Pay, Monotonous Work: Are Artist Assistant Positions Worth the Trouble?
In the course of a normal workday, Sharela Bonfield may order supplies, supervise interns, clean, answer the telephone, arrange meetings, create PowerPoint displays, handle paperwork, administer archives, and do “whatever else needs to be done.” It is difficult to say exactly what Bonfield’s job actually is, because she has so many responsibilities, but her title is clear enough: artist’s assistant. (Read more from Gallerist.)
I Didn’t Get the Job. Can I Ask Why?
If you made it to the campus-visit stage, then yes, in my opinion, you can contact the search-committee chair or department chair and ask for some feedback on your candidacy. But there’s a caveat: you have to stick to general, nondesperate sorts of questions. Questions like: “I would like to ask if you can provide any feedback on my materials or visit that would provide insight as I move forward in my job search.” (Read more from Vitae.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — July 23, 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.
Artist Resale Rights Gain Support in US Congress
A bill that would bring droit de suite, also known as artist resale royalty rights, to the United States is gaining momentum in Congress. The bill has gained six cosponsors in the past three weeks, including Representatives Sam Farr of California and Janice Schakowsky of Illinois. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Arts Companies Must Adapt to Changes at Facebook, Report Reveals
For some time now, marketers in the arts and culture sector have been worrying that updates to Facebook have resulted in their messages reaching fewer and fewer people. A new report released by the digital consultancy firm One Further reveals that these fears are justified and that a new approach to Facebook page management may be necessary. However, it’s not all doom and gloom: opportunities still exist, and arts marketers are adapting accordingly. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Revise and Resubmit!
I’m sure you’ve heard the adage “publish or perish.” In order to get tenure—or, as the abysmal job market begets hyperprofessionalization, to be considered for a job at all—a scholar must have a certain amount of articles appear in “peer-reviewed” academic journals. These journals—Obscure Subfield Quarterly, One-Word Pretentious Greek Thing, etc.—usually have a circulation of about three hundred, and those articles upon which careers depend are usually read by exactly three people. (Read more from Slate.)
How Abstract Art Can Change the Way You See Waste and Consumption in America
Abstract artwork is sometimes misinterpreted as being flatly indiscernible, when in fact it’s often simply enchanting and destabilizing, requiring a moment of contemplation from the viewer. This exhibition seeks not only to demystify abstract art but also consumption, a term that, despite its looming unwieldy aura, can be combatted in the comforts of your home, and in the confines of your humble garbage bin. (Read more from Huffington Post.)
How Much Are Curators Really Paid?
Many in the art world were staggered by recent reports that the Italian curator Germano Celant is being paid €750,000 to organize a pavilion for the Milan Expo 2015. Celant’s fee—and the incredulity it provoked—raises questions about how much curators are typically paid for organizing biennials and large-scale international exhibitions. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
The Digital Art Historian’s Toolkit
Lists of tools like this one invariably age poorly. For an always-up-to-date, much more comprehensive list of useful digital tools, see the excellent DiRT Directory. However, we felt it might be useful to our participants to have a snapshot of tools that could be useful to art historians specifically. We’ve focused here on free, off-the-shelf tools that don’t require programming knowledge and might be particularly interesting to people who work with a lot of images. (Read more from Beyond the Digital Slide Library.)
Blaming the Victim: Ladder Faculty and the Lack of Adjunct Activism
The adjunct labor movement has necessarily prioritized the working conditions of part-time faculty, many of whom are living below the poverty line. But adjuncts need not be card-carrying union members to benefit from these victories, which have transformed academia’s once-invisible underclass into its most vocal majority. The inequalities in academic employment may still be firmly in place, but thanks to these unionization efforts, contingent faculty are now active participants in the national conversation about the future of higher education. (Read more from Vitae.)
A Banker, a Scholar, and the Invention of Art History: The Story of the Warburg Brothers
Emily J. Levine’s new book details the contradictions and confusions of Jewish life in Hamburg, with ancient religious traditions vying with modern currents of thought, and ancient caution competing with tentative hopes when Jews at last began to breach the barriers of anti-Semitism in German society. Focusing on Aby Warburg’s library and two of its most illustrious users, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the art historian Erwin Panofsky, she reveals the ways in which the distinctive qualities of a single place conditioned the development of ideas in a larger sense to create a “Hamburg School” of thought, a school intimately connected with Jewish experience in Imperial and Weimar Germany. (Read more from the New Republic.)
June 2014 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — July 18, 2014
The June 2014 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, leads off with an essay by Parul Dave Mukherji, who explores the promise of postethnic art history in “Whither Art History in a Globalizing World.”
Also in the June issue, Hallie Franks investigates domestic mosaics in ancient Greece through travel metaphors associated with the symposium. In “Casts, Imprints, and the Deathliness of Things,” Marcia Pointon examines the materiality of death masks produced in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe to excavate their meanings, past and present. Next, Sugata Ray analyzes the architecture of the 1887 Jaipur Economic and Industrial Museum as destabilizing the imperial aspirations of colonial museology. Finally, Joseph Siry considers how Frank Lloyd Wright’s Kalita Humphreys Theater in Dallas realized the architect’s ambition to rethink the ideal building form for drama.
In the Reviews section, Wei-Cheng Lin considers Megan E. O’Neil’s book Engaging Ancient Maya Sculpture at Piedras Negras, Guatemala, Paul Barolsky reviews Michael W. Cole’s study Ambitious Forms: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence, and Joanne Rappaport examines Daniela Bleichmar’s Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment.
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.
The next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in September 2014, will feature a third “Whither Art History?” piece, by Claudia Valladão de Mattos, and essays on the memorializing function of Jan van Eyck’s van der Paele Virgin, the moral and phenomenological implications of a monstrous visage in Hans Burgkmair’s Crucifixion, modern interiority in Watteau’s fêtes galantes, and several exhibitions associated with the Festival of India in the United States. The issue will also include reviews on painting in early modern Japan, photography in nineteenth-century India, and the politics and power of Mughal architecture.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — July 16, 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.
Art History That! A Manifesto for the Future of a Discipline
The future of art history has much to offer and much at stake. Recent references to the discipline in popular media have encouraged a critical assessment of the so-called humanities crisis, revealing it to be a red herring for the more systemic ailments that afflict higher education. Art history has a role to play in changing the conversation about the arts and humanities in society as a whole. In an effort to spur this change, this essay describes and contextualizes Art History That, a crowd-sourced manifesto for the future of the discipline. (Read more from Visual Resources.)
Detroit’s Art May Be Worth Billions, Report Says
A new expert appraisal of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection, which some creditors are demanding be sold to help pay municipal debts in the city’s bankruptcy case, has found that the works could be worth $2.7 to $4.6 billion. The appraisal, commissioned by the city and the museum in advance of a federal bankruptcy trial in August, also added that such a price tag would never be attained at sale, for reasons including donor lawsuits that would delay or prevent the sale of many valuable works, weakness in the market for some kinds of paintings, and lower sale prices because of the sheer bulk that would flood into the market at once. (Read more from the New York Times.)
After Decades in Storage, Damaged Rothko Murals Get High-Tech Restoration
Paintings by Mark Rothko are highly coveted—in May one of his works sold at auction in London for $50 million. But oddly enough, Harvard University has had a handful of Rothkos—faded by sunlight and splattered with food and drink—in storage. Now, new technology has led to a potentially controversial restoration. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
Scholarly Journal Retracts Sixty Articles, Smashes “Peer Review Ring”
Every now and then a scholarly journal retracts an article because of errors or outright fraud. In academic circles, and sometimes beyond, each retraction is a big deal. Now comes word of a journal retracting sixty articles at once. The reason for the mass retraction is mind-blowing: a “peer review and citation ring” was apparently rigging the review process to get articles published. (Read more from the Washington Post.)
Confronting Art-World Sexism
In New York, Sperone Westwater comes in at 91 versus 9. Team Gallery at 85 versus 15, Matthew Marks at 84 versus 16, and Mary Boone at 83 versus 17. Some of the top galleries in Los Angeles tell a similar story: Blum and Poe is 89 versus 11; Prism is 88 versus 12; Thomas Solomon is 85 to 15, and Patrick Painter is 83 to 17. These numbers, as you might have guessed, reflect the percentages of male versus female artists represented by each gallery. They’re also the impetus for a new internet-driven, open-source feminist art project, Gallery Tally, organized by the Los Angeles artist and educator Micol Hebron. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
Why the World’s Most Talked-About New Art Dealer Is Instagram
Standing before Marc Quinn’s looming Myth Venus sculpture in front of Christie’s Rockefeller headquarters was a masked protester holding a large poster that read F*** U. It was a parody of Wade Guyton’s 2005 Untitled that sold for $3.52 million just hours later at the live-streamed “If I Live I’ll See You Tuesday” auction, which included thirty-five contemporary artworks from blue-chip names such as Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Martin Kippenberger, and Alex Israel, all handpicked by the contemporary art expert Loic Gouzer, with the majority of the production on his—and Christie’s—Instagram accounts. (Read more from Vogue.)
Help Desk: Friends with Benefits
A few months ago I tried to collaborate with a good friend, but we didn’t complete any work. It’s not that we spent the time just hanging out—we worked, but it just didn’t go anywhere. But I really like my friend’s work and think that we could make something great together. Should we try again? If we do, how can we make something happen? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Room for Creativity?
“Room for Creativity?” raises the question of how adjuncts try to balance their own creative and/or scholarly interests with teaching demands. I asked the participants—two English professors—to cover how they’ve both balanced (or tried to balance) their interests in poetry and other creative work with what they’ve been allowed as adjuncts to teach in the name of “course coverage.” (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
William “Bro” Adams Confirmed as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities
posted by Christopher Howard — July 09, 2014
The United States Senate today voted to confirm William D. “Bro” Adams as the 10th chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Adams is expected to begin as Chairman in the coming days.
Founded in 1965, the National Endowment for the Humanities is an independent grant-making institution of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities.
Adams, president of Colby College in Waterville, Maine from 2000 until his retirement on June 30, 2014, is a committed advocate for liberal arts education and brings to the Endowment a long record of leadership in higher education and the humanities.
A native of Birmingham, Michigan, and son of an auto industry executive, Adams earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Colorado College and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz History of Consciousness Program. He studied in France as a Fulbright Scholar before beginning his career in higher education with appointments to teach political philosophy at Santa Clara University in California and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He went on to coordinate the Great Works in Western Culture program at Stanford University and to serve as vice president and Secretary of Wesleyan University. He became president of Bucknell University in 1995 and president of Colby College in 2000.
Adams’s formal education was interrupted by three years of service in the Army, including one year in Vietnam. It was partly that experience, he says, that motivated him to study and teach in the humanities. “It made me serious in a certain way,” he says. “And as a 20-year-old combat infantry advisor, I came face to face, acutely, with questions that writers, artists, philosophers, and musicians examine in their work — starting with, ‘What does it mean to be human?’”
In each of his professional roles, Adams has demonstrated a deep understanding of and commitment to the humanities as essential to education and to civic life. At Colby, for example, he led a $376-million capital campaign – the largest in Maine history – that included expansion of the Colby College Museum of Art and the gift of the $100-million Lunder Collection of American Art, the creation of a center for arts and humanities and a film studies program, and expansion of the College’s curriculum in creative writing and writing across the curriculum. He also spearheaded formal collaboration of the college with the Maine Film Center and chaired the Waterville Regional Arts and Community Center.
As senior president of the prestigious New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), Adams has been at the center of the national conversation on the cost and value of liberal arts education. “I see the power of what is happening on our campuses and among the alumni I meet across the country and around the world,” he says. “People who engage in a profound way with a broad range of disciplines – including, and in some cases especially, with the humanities — are preparing to engage the challenges of life. They are creative and flexible thinkers; they acquire the habits of mind needed to find solutions to important problems; they can even appreciate the value of making mistakes and changing their minds. I am convinced that this kind of study is not merely defensible but critical to our national welfare.”
Adams, nicknamed Bro by his father in honor of a friend who died in World War Two, is married to Lauren Sterling, philanthropy specialist at Educare Central Maine and has a daughter and a stepson. He currently resides in Falmouth, Maine.
Deputy Chairman Carole Watson has served as Acting Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities since the departure of former Chairman James A. Leach.
Please join the conversation and offer your congratulations to Adams with #NEHBroAdams.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — July 09, 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 Ought to Underwrite Publishing Scholars’ Books?
At almost any gathering of academic publishers or librarians, you’ll hear someone float the idea—sometimes phrased as a question—that the model for publishing scholarly monographs is broken. Two sets of ideas aired at the Association of American University Presses’ recent annual meeting don’t say the model is damaged beyond repair. But the proposals, both from groups outside the university-press community, suggest that it needs to be retrofitted, at the least. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
We Should Allow Failing Arts Organizations to Die
Arts organizations are already dying. In Detroit, in New York City, in the United Kingdom. From operas to art galleries. This is no longer an urban versus rural debate. A nonprofit versus for profit debate. A “one discipline is dying” but “others are inexplicably thriving” debate. This is a simple acknowledgement that the industry is in decline. And I think that not only should we allow it, we should encourage it. (Read more from Medium.)
Race, Gender, and Academic Jobs
I am currently the lowest-paid tenure-track faculty member in my department and was told by the man paid to manage me that if I wanted a raise I would probably need to get a new job or at least an offer that might prompt a counteroffer. So I went on the job market and was lucky enough to score a campus interview for an assistant professor position at a liberal arts college in an ideal location. Let’s just call this place Rich Liberal Arts College. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Does the Mojave Desert Need an Artist-Built Swimming Pool? Maybe
The art world loves a work of art that requires trekking to a remote location. There’s Spiral Jetty, one of the most iconic pieces of land art in existence, on the northern shores of the Great Salt Lake. New Mexico has Lightning Field, Walter de Maria’s installation of four hundred stainless-steel poles that serves as Minimal sculpture at most times and a veritable light show during lightning storms. These experiences are about long journeys, landscape, and meditation. Now there’s another piece to add to this list: Social Pool by the Austrian artist Alfredo Barsuglia, who was a resident at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
At Mellon, Signs of Change
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has a reputation for moving in mysterious ways. For forty-five years, it has steadily handed out money—lots of it—to sustain the humanities and the performing arts. As times have gotten tougher, Mellon’s deep pockets have become increasingly important. The foundation tends to attract an unusual level of anxiety and interest, like a rich uncle whose quirks and whims keep poorer relations on their toes. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
When Copy and Paste Reigned in the Age of Scrapbooking
Cutting, pasting, collating—this feels like a new behavior, a desperate attempt to cope with a radical case of information overload. But it’s actually a quite venerable urge. Indeed, back in the nineteenth century we had a similarly intense media barrage, and we used a very similar technology to handle it: the scrapbook. (Read more from the Smithsonian.)
By Design
There are toxic words in every field and, when it comes to design, two of the most ominous are “sculptural” and “artistic.” Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with design projects exhibiting either quality, but those that are described as doing so seldom do. Instead, they are likely to be any or all of the following: bland, silly, blingy, pretentious, shoddy, derivative, ugly, ridiculous, or unjustifiably expensive. (Read more from Frieze.)
Make Sure the Artists Are on Board
The artist-trustees at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles—John Baldessari, Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger, and Ed Ruscha—went from filling what could have been seen as symbolic posts, demonstrating the museum’s commitment to living artists, to playing a critical role in the museum’s recent public-relations crisis and its recovery-in-progress. Other contemporary art museums are also making space for at least one artist on their boards. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
NEA Selects Wendy Clark as Director of Museums, Visual Arts, and Indemnity
posted by Christopher Howard — July 08, 2014
The National Endowment for the Arts is pleased to announce the appointment of Wendy Clark as director of Museums, Visual Arts, and Indemnity. Clark has served as acting director of Museums, Visual Arts, and Indemnity since November 2012 and will continue to manage the NEA’s grantmaking in this area, as well as the program’s special initiatives, such as Blue Star Museums.
NEA Deputy Chairman Patrice Walker Powell noted “Ms. Clark brings to this leadership position a wealth of knowledge and experience with the people and institutions that comprise the visual arts and museum field. She is an asset to our organization, an advocate for the field, and a long-term NEA leader.”
Clark has more than 20 years of experience managing various federal grant programs and special initiatives at the NEA in the fields of museums, visual arts, and design, including the Mayor’s Institute on City Design, Your Town, the American Masterpieces/Visual Arts Touring Program, the Rosa Parks Sculpture Competition for the Architect of the Capitol, and the Renna Scholarship Grants Program. Prior to her role as acting director, she was the museum specialist, working primarily on Art Works grants and special initiatives and advising hundreds of museums annually seeking funding for exhibitions, conservation, commissions, care of collections, educational outreach, and reinstallation projects. She has represented the agency annually at the American Alliance of Museums conference as both a presenter and exhibitor. Clark is a member of ArtTable, an organization dedicated to advancing women’s leadership in the visual arts field.
“I’m thrilled to help the nation’s museums and visual arts organizations—with their aligned missions and divergent needs—continue to present the work of excellent artists to the American people. To be part of this community is an honor,” said Clark. “Museums have a tall and challenging order, increasingly called upon to be civic anchor, community gathering place, and stewards of our most prized cultural heritage. I remain energized and fulfilled by public service.”
Prior to coming to the NEA, Clark held positions at the Illinois Arts Council in public affairs, visual arts, and design. There she worked on a traveling exhibition program initiative, and a cultural facilities planning and design grant program called Building by Design, which was awarded a Federal Design Achievement Award by the NEA’s Presidential Design Awards jury. She was an NEA Fellow in arts administration, and was the chairman of the Design Review Committee for the Civic Association of Hollin Hills, a mid-century modern residential development designed by architect Charles Goodman and landscape architect Dan Kiley.
Clark has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and studied Elizabethan history, art, and literature at New College, Oxford University. She is originally from Dayton, Ohio.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — July 02, 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.
A World without Tenure? That’s a World without Shared Governance, Too
We’ve been reading arguments against tenure for a while, of course, but there’s a real corporatist edge to recent contributions to the genre. These broadsides envision an Orwellian campus where freedom is servitude—specifically, intellectual servitude to the whims of education technocrats holding up their forefingers to test the winds of supposed market forces. What the antitenure crowd fails to acknowledge is that higher education, as an “industry,” is unique. (Read more from Vitae.)
What Is a Page in the Digital Age?
What is a page? What is a book? These are just two of the questions facing the cohort of museums participating in the Getty Foundation’s Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI), which is helping the field move into online publishing. The Walker Art Center has launched its OSCI publication, On Performativity, which provides another spellbinding answer to the question driving this initiative: How can we rethink the museum catalogue for the digital age? (Read more from the Getty Iris.)
The Incorporated Woman
Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and a host of other big companies in today’s “data-driven economy” share one thing in common: they make a living from harvesting personal data. To regain some ownership and control of her data, Jennifer Lyn Morone decided to become Jennifer Lyn Morone™ Inc (JLM), registered like all savvy corporations in Delaware. And what started as an art project—her brief as part of a master’s degree at London’s Royal College of Art was to “design a protest”—is now transforming her into a humanoid/corporate hybrid. (Read more from the Economist.)
Autonomous Filing Cabinet Embodies Our Everlasting Data Trail
A filing cabinet is following people around the Royal College of Art to remind us that our data is everywhere—and it will follow us everywhere. I Know What You Did Last Summer is Jaap de Maat’s final-year project, the finale to a two-year-long MA in information experience design. And anyone visiting the college this weekend will certainly get a dose of that design experience, as the clunky metal cabinet trundles toward them, stalking their every move. (Read more from Ars Technica.)
Summer Boundaries
Historically, it has been relatively common for some faculty members, particularly those with lower-level administrative responsibilities, to be informally on the hook during the summer months, expected to respond to email and keep up with loose threads, but to go uncompensated for their work during that time period. In addition to being a form of de facto exploitation, such patterns contribute to the gradual but steady marginalization of academic labor across multiple fronts. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
#arthistory: Instagram and the Intro to Art History Course
From museum selfies to the digital humanities, Instagram has become a major force in the art world. Artists now cultivate “Instagram practices,” art institutions have thousands of followers, and hashtags like #monalisa have over 200,000 entries. People in their late teens and twenties—the age demographic that dominates Instagram—contribute the majority of these posts, yet the app is more likely to be banned from college classrooms than encouraged. In a period when educators are grappling with divergences between social media–driven forms of communication and academic communication, Instagram has potential to both enrich content and strengthen the discipline’s relevance for contemporary learners. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
Building a Better Nonacademic Career Panel
Just last week, one of my graduate-school deans invited me to present on a nonacademic career panel with three other alumni. I’m happy to act as a resource for my alma mater—and for graduate students struggling to navigate their career options. But sometimes I wonder if I’m doing much good by showing up. I’m convinced that these panels do little to help their audiences explore, much less pursue, options outside the academy. (Read more from Vitae.)
The Pen Is Mightier Than the Brush? Looking at Six Famous American Male Artist-Critics
Artists have always had a complicated relationship with art criticism. “Do not be an art critic, but paint; therein lies salvation,” Paul Cézanne wrote to his fellow painter Émile Bernard in 1904. Eugène Delacroix wrote an entire essay on the subject in 1829 called “On Art Criticism,” in which he found that art critics—or “watchful dragons” as he called them—“have always presented difficulties.” If artists and art critics are such separate species, what are we to think of artists who themselves are art critics? (Read more from Artspace Magazine.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — June 25, 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.
AAMD Sanctions Delaware Art Museum
AAMD is deeply troubled and saddened that the Delaware Art Museum has deaccessioned and sold a work of art from its collection to pay outstanding debt and build its operating endowment. Art museums collect works of art for the benefit of present and future generations. Responsible stewardship of a museum’s collection and the conservation, exhibition, and study of these works are the heart of a museum’s commitment to its community and to the public. (Read more from the Association of Art Museum Directors.)
Delaware Art Museum Painting Brings $4.25 Million
The Delaware Art Museum’s first painting up for auction, William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil, sold for $4.25 million last week, far short of Christie’s low estimate of $8.4 million. The 1868 work by the Pre-Raphaelite master sold within two minutes at Christie’s in London, with a starting bid of £1.9 million. (Read more from the Delaware News Journal.)
Humanities Funding Still in Recovery from Recession
Total funding for humanities research, education, and programs in the United States is still below prerecession levels, according to a new report released last week by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The report, The State of the Humanities: Funding 2014, gathers data on the array of funding sources, large and small, that underwrite the humanities, revealing that federal, state, and private support to the humanities are still recovering from the recession. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)
Help Desk: To Apply Oneself
The annual application process for many residencies, fellowships, and publishing opportunities is tough. Should there be a limit on the number of times you apply for the same opportunity before you realize that they just aren’t interested in your practice? Or is it more valuable to demonstrate a little fortitude? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
No One Sits Here Anymore: How Spikes and Fences Erase Communal Life
Since the day it first opened, the windows of my neighborhood gym have been a gathering point for neighbors. They’re right at street level, and they’re big. Lots of us had sat on their deep windowsills for many years, most of all the Pakistanis who live in the surrounding area. Note that I wrote, “had sat,” because ever since Barcelona’s City Hall installed some giant metal plates, no one sits there anymore. The gatherings and chitchats are over. (Read more from Creative Time Reports.)
How Cities Use Design to Drive Homeless People Away
Earlier this month, someone tweeted a picture of a series of metal spikes built into the ground outside a London apartment building. The spikes were intended to discourage homeless people from sleeping in the area, and their presence sparked a public outcry. London’s mayor called the spikes “ugly, self defeating & stupid,” and the mayor of Montreal called similar spikes in his own city “unacceptable!!!!” Protesters poured concrete over a set of spikes outside a Tesco supermarket. Then, after a petition was signed by nearly 130,000 people, the spikes were removed from the London apartment building, the Tesco, and downtown Montreal. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Should I Go to Art School?
You’ve sent me a tricky one, my dear. There are many personal factors that must be carefully considered by each individual, working in any artistic discipline, who is grappling with this question. While I have no way of knowing your personal capacities, I can certainly give you my general opinion … and you know I love doing that. (Read more from KCET.)
Hemingway: A Simple Online Tool for Better Short-Form Writing (Museum 2.0)
Exhibit labels. Promotional text. Grant proposals. For many arts and museum professionals, writing one-hundred-word chunks of text is a daily activity. Unfortunately, much of that writing is lousy. We have great references for better art writing but don’t always use them. Instead we pack sentences with highfalutin vocabulary, pepper them with clauses, and wrap them up in insider language. Recently, I discovered an online tool called Hemingway that can change that. Its intent is “to make your writing bold and clear.” (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
New Appointments to CAA’s Editorial Boards
posted by Christopher Howard — June 24, 2014
The president of CAA’s Board of Directors, DeWitt Godfrey, has made appointments to the editorial boards of CAA’s three scholarly journals, in consultation with the editorial boards and the vice president for publications, Suzanne Preston Blier. The appointments take effect on July 1, 2014.
Art Journal
Two new members-at-large have joined the Art Journal Editorial Board. Tirza True Latimer is an associate professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and chair of its graduate program in visual and critical studies. Janet Kraynak is an associate professor of contemporary art history at the New School in New York, with joint appointment at Parsons the New School for Design and Eugene Lang College. The terms for Latimer and Kraynak extend until June 30, 2018.
The Art Bulletin
The Art Bulletin has announced its next reviews editor: Nancy Um, associate professor in the Department of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, and a scholar of Islamic art and visual culture. For the past year, Um has been a scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. From 2011 to 2014, she served as the inaugural reviews editor of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture. Um is the author of The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (University of Washington Press, 2009), as well as many essays and book chapters. Um will succeed Rachael DeLue of Princeton University, beginning a three-year-term as reviews editor on July 1, 2015, with the preceding year as reviews editor designate.
caa.reviews
The caa.reviews Editorial Board welcomes two new members-at-large: Meredith Cohen and Suzanne Hudson. Cohen is a historian of the art, architecture, and urbanism of medieval Europe and an assistant professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Hudson is an assistant professor of art history and fine arts at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and currently serves as the caa.reviews field editor for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art on the West Coast. Both Cohen and Hudson will serve four-year terms on the editorial board, from July 1, 2014, to June 30, 2018.
The caa.reviews Council of Field Editors has four new members. Phillip Bloom, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Indiana in Bloomington and a visiting researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo for 2013–14, will commission reviews of books on Chinese art. Edward A. Vazquez, assistant professor of history of art and architecture at Middlebury College in Vermont, will be the field editor for exhibitions of modern and contemporary art in the northeastern United States. Megan Cifarelli, an associate professor at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, and chair of her school’s program in art history, will assign reviews of books on ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern art for the journal. Finally, Pamela M. Fletcher, a professor of art history and codirector of the Digital and Computational Studies Initiative at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, joins caa.reviews to oversee reviews of digital projects in the visual arts.