CAA News Today

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

Sustaining Open Access

A recently proposed model on open-access publishing has drawn praise for rethinking the roles institutions, libraries, and professional organizations play in promoting scholarly communication, but can its collaborative structure be sustained? The proposal envisions stakeholders forming partnerships, each handling one or more of the duties of funding, distributing, and preserving open-access scholarly research—specifically in the humanities and social sciences. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Detroit’s Clever and Likely Illegal Art-for-Pensions Deal

The $816 million art-for-pensions deal that is designed to preserve the Detroit Institute of Arts collection is fascinating, imaginative, and clever. But it’s almost certainly illegal. And I’ll show you why. (Read more from the Washington Post.)

Artworks for Sale Online: It’s a Booming Way to Gatecrash the Elite Gallery World

The World Wide Web is frequently cast as the great enemy of traditional culture, undermining the music industry, the film industry, and publishing. Yet one form of art has now found a way through—perhaps even a way to thrive—and provide careers for artists of the future. The visual arts are booming online. Experienced art collectors and newcomers are both increasingly using websites to find original contemporary works and ordering them for delivery like furniture. (Read more from the Guardian.)

What’s the Most Common Mistake Artists Make?

Your question has set my head spinning. There are so many possibilities. So many mistakes that artists make—like not taking the business side of art seriously or only taking it seriously in the middle of a crisis when, as I mentioned in my last post, it is too late. Or romanticizing the “starving artist” notion. Or allowing themselves to become resentful of other artists’ success. (Read more from KCET.)

The Paradox of Art as Work

There are few modern relationships as fraught as the one between art and money. Are they mortal enemies, secret lovers, or perfect soul mates? Is the bond between them a source of pride or shame, a marriage of convenience, or something tawdrier? The way we habitually think and talk about these matters betrays a deep and venerable ambivalence. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Flipped Learning Skepticism: Do Students Want to Have Lectures?

Students in a flipped classroom are rebelling because they want you to lecture to them and to explain how to do everything so that they can earn a top grade in the class. Here are some responses to this issue that one could make. (Read more from Casting Out Nines.)

Teaching Outside Your Subject Area

This spring Art History Teaching Resources (AHTR) asked Jenn Ball if it could facilitate a project with her students with the intent of posting the process on the AHTR site. At her suggestion, the discussion focused on teaching a unit in the survey outside of one’s area of expertise, something art history professors are faced with each semester. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

Sixteen Artist Hangouts You Can Still Go To

Since the days of Hemingway and Faulkner, bars and cafes where writers, painters, and performance artists go to procrastinate have often caught the public’s imagination. The romance of the artist’s hangout is irresistible. From rivalries fermented over drinks to witty one-liners exchanged by Dorothy Parker and her well-read pals, these are the places of a struggling artist’s networking dreams. Even better, some of the most iconic artist hangouts and literary pubs that continue to welcome patrons today. (Read more from CNN.)

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.

Michelangelo’s David Sculpture at Risk of Collapse

Michelangelo’s famous statue of the biblical figure David is at risk of collapse due to the weakening of the artwork’s legs and ankles, according to a report recently published by art experts. The findings, which were made public by Italy’s National Research Council, show microfractures in the ankle and leg areas. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times).

The False Promise of the Digital Humanities

The humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities. In 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association convention: “among all the contending subfields,” a reporter wrote about that year’s gathering, “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Even earlier, the National Endowment for the Humanities created its Office of Digital Humanities to help fund projects. And digital humanities continues to go from strength to strength, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of universities with large grants. (Read more from the New Republic).

The Adjunct Revolt: How Poor Professors Are Fighting Back

Mary-Faith Cerasoli has been reduced to “sleeping in her car, showering at college athletic centers and applying for food stamps,” the New York Times recently reported. Is she unemployed? No, in fact, she is a college professor—but an adjunct one, meaning she is hired on a short-term contract with no possibility of tenure. (Read more from the Atlantic).

Art and the Internet of Things: A Turning Point in Creative Education

In the art world’s internal sense of time, the degree show is in many ways the equivalent of New Year’s Eve: a point at which to collectively celebrate the birth of the future, while taking stock of the events of the past year. Reflecting on the 2013–14 academic year, it is clear that one of the most pressing issues is that of value, and the need continually to defend the arts in this respect. It is interesting to note the difference between making art for yourself—which holds value for you as an individual—and pursuing a career as an artist by studying for a degree in fine art or a related field. By doing the latter, you are implicitly deciding that your creativity also holds value for others. (Read more from the Guardian).

To Bind and to Liberate: Printing Out the Internet

“Printing the internet is not creative nor art. It is a waste of time and resources. Please, find something more creative to do.” So reads a comment on a petition on change.org. Directed at Kenneth Goldsmith, the petition was published in 2013 in response to a project the poet organized at LABOR gallery in Mexico City, where Goldsmith invited people from all over the world to print out the internet and send the pages to the gallery. (Read more from Rhizome).

Five Tips for Grant Research

It’s easy to get excited about the prospect of funding via grants, which carry a certain amount of prestige and the assurance that your work is (at least somewhat) funded, not to mention the fact that, if a funder is willing to give you a grant, they respect your work. But as the saying goes, only fools rush in. (Read more from Fractured Atlas).

Pat Badani at CAA: In Conversation with the Editor of Media-N Journal

At CAA’s 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago, Joshua Selmanand Pat Badanilaunched a discussion that examined what was happening at CAA this year as it applied to the New Media Caucus, to Media-N Journal, and to CAA members. (Read more from Artist Organized Art).

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.

77,000 Images of Tapestries and Italian Monuments Join the Open Content Program

The Getty Research Institute has just added more than 77,000 high-resolution images to the Open Content Program from two of its most often-used collections. The largest part of the new open-content release—more than 72,000 photographs—comes from the collection Foto Arte Minore: Max Hutzel photographs of art and architecture in Italy. (Read more from the Getty Iris.)

NGA Online Editions

Available for the first time on the National Gallery of Art’s website, NGA Online Editions presents the most current, in-depth information on the museum’s collections by the world’s leading art historians along with rich capabilities for exploring that information. A customized reading environment and toolkit for managing text and images are intended both to provide scholars with a useful workspace for research and to encourage the study and appreciation of art. (Read more from the National Gallery of Art.)

As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate the Messy World of Discovery Tools

Many professors and students gravitate to Google as a gateway to research. Libraries want to offer them a comparably simple and broad experience for searching academic content. As a result, a major change is under way in how libraries organize information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialized databases—books here, articles there—many libraries are bulldozing their digital silos. They now offer one-stop search boxes that comb entire collections, Google style. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Previously Unknown Warhol Works Discovered on Floppy Disks from 1985

A multi-institutional team of new-media artists, computer experts, and museum professionals has discovered a dozen previously unknown experiments by Andy Warhol on aging floppy disks from 1985. The purely digital images, “trapped” for nearly thirty years on Amiga floppy disks stored in the archives collection of the Andy Warhol Museum, were discovered and extracted by members of the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Club, with assistance from the museum’s staff, the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, the Hillman Photography Initiative at the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the artist Cory Arcangel. (Read more from the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.)

The Happy Hour Test

Getting a job, as we all know, can prove mysterious. Just what determines if one gets the job or not? And what, for departments and committees, proves the deciding factor? If things are relatively equal by the finalist stage, and they usually are, then what? I’d contend that many, maybe most searches come down to the intangibles. And the biggest and most indefinable of them all is simply fitting in. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Why This Movie Perfectly Re-Created a Picasso, Destroyed It, and Mailed the Evidence to Picasso’s Estate

Imagine this: You’ve just spent three weeks painstakingly replicating a Picasso painting from scratch—you’ve scrutinized documentation about the artist’s creative process; you’ve practiced his brushstrokes, so your work will look convincing; you’ve even painted in noted preliminary images, then covered them up, because that’s what he did. You’ve toiled over this, all for mere seconds of screen time in a film. And then you have to destroy it. (Read more from Vanity Fair.)

Ten Steps to Becoming an Adjunct Ally

There have been plenty of word battles recently between tenure-track faculty and adjuncts as the crisis within higher education has become more publicized, and it is more important than ever that tenured and full-time allies take action in support their colleagues and students as we struggle to take back our colleges from corporate mismanagement. Here are some direct steps tenure-track and other full-time faculty can take to support adjunct faculty. (Read more from Fugitive Faculty.)

Warming Up to the Culture of Wikipedia

If ever there was the antithesis of the crowd-sourced Wikipedia, it would be a museum, where an expert picks what is seen and not seen, then carefully prepares captions explaining what each piece of art means. But while there used to be innate suspicion toward Wikipedia among museum staffs, even hostility, in recent years there has increasingly been cooperation. Wikipedia’s volunteer editors are frequently invited to spend the day at museums and archives to create and improve articles related to the works housed there. (Read more from the New York Times.)

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.

Summer Survival Strategies for Adjuncts

I’ve lived through enough adjunct summers to know that things get pretty difficult financially around late July. What little money you managed to scrape together during the school year is long gone, and you’re at least two rent cycles away from the next paycheck. For adjuncts who aren’t lucky enough to score classes, the end of the summer can become a deeply stressful period of doing whatever it takes—borrowing, penny-pinching, and scouring Craigslist for odd jobs. (Read more from Vitae.)

Personal Finance in Grad School

Living on a grad student stipend is tough, but we often make it harder on ourselves if we don’t know where the money is going. By tracking our spending habits, we can get a better sense of what we value, our motivations for spending, and areas where we can save a few dollars or even a few hundred dollars. (Read more from GradHacker.)

Can an Economist’s Theory Apply to Art?

Thomas Piketty is a name on a lot of people’s lips at the moment. The French economist’s new book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is a historic survey of wealth concentration that has quickly become a go-to text for the gathering debate on income inequality. In his book, published in English last month, Piketty argues that the rich are only going to get richer as a result of free-market capitalism. The reason, he says, is simple: returns on invested capital are greater than rates of economic growth, and this has become a “fundamental force for divergence” in society. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Detroit Pension Deals Make Sale of DIA Art Less Likely—but Still Possible

Some bankruptcy experts said that it now appears increasingly unlikely that creditors will be able to get their hands on the city-owned art collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts. But experts also said that even in the wake of tentative agreements between the city and Detroit retirees and pensioners, the bondholders, and others pushing hard for a sale of art still have viable legal arguments. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)

The Importance of Being a Director-Curator

For those occupying the highest positions in art institutions, spending time with the works that fill their galleries is inevitably more limited than in their earlier curatorial roles. The chance to do the job that made their name—organizing groundbreaking exhibitions or displaying exemplary scholarship—become fewer as bureaucratic demands become greater. Two directors have arguably the most demanding administrative roles in European museums—Udo Kittelmann and Nicholas Serota—both of who continue to take on lead curator roles in major shows. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

The Lost, Surprisingly Soulful Art of Corporate Identity

Before corporations, entertainment companies, sports franchises, and political parties acquired “brand narratives,” the notion of branding was a subset of a practice called “corporate identity.” CI, as it was known, required companies and design firms to develop, refine, and maintain an integrated identity system defined by laws set down in a bible known as the graphic standards manual. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

How to Earn Tenure II

So now your clock is running out. In some cases, you’ll be asked to write up a personal statement to be included in your dossier. This can be a tricky thing to write. On the one hand, it will be read by experts in your field. On the other hand, it will also be read by some people who don’t know the first thing about your field. How can you possibly write one document to serve such disparate audiences? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Confronting the Myth of the “Digital Native”

When Kaitlin Jennrich first walked into her communications seminar last fall, she had no idea that the professor already knew of her affinity for pink cars and Olive Garden breadsticks—and that she planned to share that knowledge with the class. It hadn’t taken much sleuthing on the professor’s part to uncover those inane nuggets. The eighteen-year-old freshman at Northwestern University had herself lobbed them into the public sphere, via Twitter. Her reaction, she recalls, was, “Oh, no.” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

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

Dealing Direct: Do Artists Really Need Galleries?

When Haunch of Venison closed in 2013, the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos was left without a gallery in London or New York—the two cities where Haunch, which was bought by Christie’s in 2007, had spaces. Since her gallery closed, Vasconcelos’s career has been on an upward trajectory: she has represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale, unveiled public sculptures in Porto and Lisbon, and produced several new works for a retrospective at the Manchester Art Gallery. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Value/Labor/Arts: A Primer

“When is it okay to work for free? Is it acceptable as long as you’re working with—or for—another artist? What is an artistic service?” These are some of the questions raised by Shannon Jackson, director of the Arts Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in her introduction to Art Practical’s latest issue, Valuing Labor. (Read more from Daily Serving.)

The Best Prospective Law Students Read Homer (and Study Art History)

Several years ago, Michael Nieswiadomy released a paper on the LSAT scores of economics majors. I thought I’d make some inquiries with LSAC for some data on this subject to follow up. Applicants to law schools who have degrees in classics placed first, and art-history majors came fourth. (Read more from Excess of Democracy.)

Low Expectations, High Stakes

More than half the nation’s most vulnerable college students are in courses taught by part-time, adjunct faculty members who lack the job security, credentials, and experience of full-time professors—as well as the campus support their full-time peers receive. Community colleges rely on part-time, “contingent” instructors to teach 58 percent of their courses, according to a new report. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Team-Based Learning for Art Historians

Recently two professors participated in a workshop on team-based learning at Brooklyn College, a process in which students are divided into permanent teams for the semester and work during class on activities based on readings. Team-based learning was developed by professors working with business and marketing majors in large lecture classes. While claims that students reportedly read and engage more are attractive, can this model be applied to an art-history class? (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

Precocious Professionalism: An Academic Epidemic?

The job crisis facing young American PhDs today has an analogue in one earlier historical period: the situation of newly minted lawyers and physicians in early-nineteenth-century France. After the French Revolution abolished the guilds, regulation of recruitment ceased in not only artisanal crafts and mercantile trades but also faculties of law and medicine. As the number of law and medical students soared, employment prospects correspondingly diminished. (Read more from Perspectives on History.)

Insurer Solicits Offers for DIA Artwork; Several Billion-Dollar Bids Received

A group of major Detroit creditors said four investors have made tentative billion-dollar bids for the Detroit Institute of Arts—or key portions of its collection—in a move aimed at undercutting the city’s competing proposal to give the museum to a nonprofit in exchange for $816 million in outside funding that would help reduce pension cuts. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)

How to Avoid a Digital Boom and Bust

The Microsoft Corporation donated more than $1.5 million worth of software to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to upgrade its computer systems and help the museum put more of its collection online. Meanwhile, the Art Institute of Chicago will soon launch an app that transforms visitors’ smartphones into pocket-sized curators. Like many digital projects, the Art Institute’s app and the MFA Boston’s upgrades received a green light only because of external funding. But some experts worry about what will happen if and when grants for digital development diminish. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)