CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 11, 2013
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.
DIA in Peril: A Look at the Museum’s Long, Tangled Relationship with Detroit Politics and Finances
Anyone who thinks that art and politics inhabit separate spheres within civic life need only explore the roller-coaster history of the Detroit Institute of Arts. The latest example, of course, is Detroit’s bankruptcy. The crisis, which has attracted international attention, could cripple—or kill—one of America’s finest encyclopedic art museums, the signature cultural institution not only in Detroit but for the state of Michigan. (Read more in the Detroit Free Press.)
Responding to Negative Feedback about Your Art
I recently had an email conversation with an artist who had just been through battle on her blog. After years of extensive blogging, she received her first negative comment, an inflammatory comment about a post she had written with some derogatory comments about her art thrown in for good measure. The level of vitriol in the comment was a bit dumbfounding, especially since it didn’t seem to be coming from a dissatisfied customer, rather from a random visitor to the site who wouldn’t seem to have any good reason to be so … blunt. (Read more in Red Dot Blog.)
Insider Tips from the Art World’s Social-Media Pros
To get a better sense of how museums and art organizations are adapting to and embracing the increasing centrality of social media to their missions, Blouin Artinfo spoke to the experts: the people behind some of the art world’s richest and most rewarding social-media accounts. For this second installment in a three-part series, we put some questions to workers at the Brooklyn Museum the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Queens Museum of Art. (Read more from Blouin Artinfo.)
Museum Jobs That Didn’t Exist in 2003
Many of these new positions, whether or not they are grounded in new technologies, reflect deeper changes in organizational focus and culture. When the Victoria and Albert Museum appoints Sophia George as their first game designer in residence, it acknowledges that gaming has become a new literacy through which people can connect with museum content. When the Worcester Art Museum hires Adam Rozan as director of audience engagement and the Oakland Museum of California engages Lisa Sasaki as director of audience and civic engagement, it signals a subtle but profound shift in organizational focus. (Read more from Center for the Future of Museums.)
The Adjunct Advantage
A major new study has found that new students at Northwestern University learn more when their instructors are adjuncts than when they are tenure-track professors. The study—released by the National Bureau of Economic Research—found that the gains are greatest for the students with the weakest academic preparation. And the study found that the gains extended across a wide range of disciplines. The authors of the study suggest that by looking at measures of student learning, and not just course or program completion, their work may provide a significant advance in understanding the impact of non-tenure-track instructors. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Belittled Women
One recent afternoon, a gallerist visiting from the United States walked into the office of an established London gallery, openly accessible from the exhibition space. “Hello girls,” he said in greeting to the two young women who were working at adjacent desks. The visitor (male, white, middle-aged) assumed that these “girls” (female, white, seemingly in their 20s) were not gallerists, but rather gallerinas. (Read more in Frieze.)
Technology Sheds Light on Six Great Art Mysteries
Beneath the familiar faces of hundreds of paintings lining the walls of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, a host of secrets sit, waiting to be discovered. Whether a Picasso or Leonardo, every canvas holds brushstrokes that might conceal something else: a secondary painting, perhaps, or a mystery waiting to be untangled by John Delaney, the museum’s senior imaging scientist. On a typical day, he patiently places a painting in front of a specialized camera and completes a scan, which will reveal not just what’s under the paint, but also what is happening at each layer of paint that lies under the surface. (Read more in National Geographic.)
The Conversations We’re Not Having—Overcoming Uncertainty, Chilling Effects, and Open-Access Complacency
On more than one occasion in the past year, I’ve overheard a publisher or librarian note that there is an important topic in the library world, one that has major implications for libraries’ futures, and for librarianship in general. Yet, these observers have noted, very few librarians are willing to publicly discuss this topic. The topic is how open access threatens to defund libraries and marginalize their librarians and staffs. (Read more in the Scholarly Kitchen.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — September 04, 2013
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.
Higher-Ed Associations Form Joint Steering Group to Build Federated System for Publicly Funded Research
The Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities have announced the formation of a joint steering group to advance a proposed network of digital repositories at universities, libraries, and other research institutions across the United States that will provide long-term public access to federally funded research articles and data. (Read more from the Association of Research Libraries.)
Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology
Online education arguably came of age in the last year, with the explosion of massive open online courses driving the public’s (and politicians’) interest in digitally delivered courses and contributing to the perception that they represent not only higher education’s future, but its present. Faculty members, by and large, still aren’t buying—and they are particularly skeptical about the value of MOOCs, Inside Higher Ed’s new Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggests. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Berlin Decision: Old Masters Stay Put
Jeffrey Hamburger, the Harvard professor behind the petition, now more than a year old, asking Prussian authorities to reconsider their plan to mothball half of Berlin’s collection of old masters so they could place a modern art collection in the Gemäldegalerie, its current home, is declaring victory. And, true, the old-master paintings will not move from their current location. (Read more in Real Clear Arts.)
Insider Tips from the Art World’s Social-Media Pros
Just a few years ago most major museums’ social-media strategy consisted of a sporadically updated Facebook page and little else. Today, social media is a key aspect of art organizations’ outreach. Many institutions maintain profiles on multiple platforms, from Tumblr and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube, updating each one multiple times throughout the day. But with this expansion in the volume of content and the number of channels through which it’s posted has also come a better understanding of the role social media can play in helping museums and art organizations accomplish their goals. (Read more from Blouin Artinfo.)
A Conversation with an Artist/Nonprofit Worker about Her Money
I’m 29. I work in the communications department at a nonprofit in Manhattan and live in Brooklyn. Currently my salary is $39,750. Benefits include health insurance, life insurance (which is free via the health insurance), optional dental and vision, and 401(k). Public transit, parking, and childcare can be put on a prepaid card pre-tax. My office doesn’t participate in any federally available tax breaks for reimbursing bike expenses, which irks me since I mostly bike there. There’s also an FSA card for healthcare costs not covered by insurance, like copays and glasses. (Read more in the Billfold.)
Discovering Open-Access Art History
This article evaluates the indexing of open-access art journals in four frequently used art indexes: Art Full Text, ARTBibliographies Modern, Art and Architecture Complete, and Bibliography of the History of Art/International Bibliography of Art. The authors also compare the indexing of open-access journals in Google Scholar to that in the traditional indexes mentioned above and demonstrate that the content coverage from commercial indexes currently lags behind that of Google Scholar. This article argues that increased indexing of open-access art journals in the traditional, subject-specific indexes will be integral to their acceptance within the discipline of art history. (Read more in the Serials Librarian via Alex Watkins 123)
Help Desk: Art Fairs Everywhere
I may be in an enviable position, but it is a sticky one nonetheless. I’m getting to the position where I may be represented by multiple galleries that want to show my work at art fairs. With the rise of the art fair as a way of selling and promoting artists, how might I go about deciding which gallery will show my work at a fair? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Academy Fight Song
This essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry. (Read more in the Baffler.)
STAFF SPOTLIGHT: ALAN GILBERT
posted by Christopher Howard — August 29, 2013
Alan Gilbert in Marfa, Texas
Alan Gilbert (photograph by Nina Subin)
A poet and a critic, Alan Gilbert has been staff editor of caa.reviews since 2005. He recently spent three weeks in Marfa, Texas, as a Lannan Foundation writer-in-residence. Gilbert is the author of the poetry books The Treatment of Monuments (2012) and Late in the Antenna Fields (2011), as well as a collection of writings on contemporary poetry and art entitled Another Future: Poetry and Art in a Postmodern Twilight (2006). CAA spoke with him recently about his residency experience.
How did the Lannan Foundation residency come about?
The residency is by nomination only, and I was thrilled to receive an email back in January saying I could come any time during the next year for up to eight weeks. I ended up choosing the first three weeks in July.
What did you work on during your residency?
I was able to finish a new manuscript of poems and prepare it to send out to potential publishers.
How does Marfa compare to New York and did it have an effect of your work?
The primary thing I noticed about Marfa was the silence. There are quieter parts of New York, but it’s still difficult to avoid the sounds of sirens, buses, car horns, stereos, neighbors, et cetera. My house and street in Marfa were incredibly quiet. Some afternoons, a car wouldn’t drive by for hours. I’m not sure of the effect it had on my work, but the effect it had on my psyche and physiology felt transformative, especially after living in New York for fifteen years. More mundanely, I had extended, uninterrupted time to write, which can be harder and harder to find.
Did you come to art from poetry? If so, why?
I did come to art from poetry, but I came to both poetry and art from a larger history of the twentieth-century avant-garde, whether literature, art, music, or film. (Stan Brakhage was one of my teachers when I was an undergraduate.) Also, the current critical discourse around contemporary visual art is much more advanced than the one around poetry, and so I was intrigued to figure out what I could learn from it and take back to poetry and other art forms.
How did your reading at the Marfa Book Company on July 13 go?
It was great. It was part of the series of readings given by Lannan residents, and so the audience has an informed and wide-ranging knowledge of contemporary writing. For example, the writer who read two weeks before me was the acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead.
What was the sense of community, if any, at Marfa? Did you collaborate with anyone or make new contacts?
In fact, the best thing about Marfa is precisely this sense of community. Otherwise, it’s just a tiny, fairly impoverished town (pop. 2,000) in the West Texas desert, three hours from the nearest major airport in El Paso. Of course it also has some great art. The Marfa Book Company owner, Tim Johnson, is incredibly energetic and supportive and widely loved. His partner, Caitlin Murray, who works at the Judd Foundation in Marfa and writes about Donald Judd and his contemporaries, is wonderful. Fairfax Dorn, who cofounded Ballroom Marfa, has an expansive vision for art. Hamilton Fish V, who helped revive The Nation in the 1970s and is a film producer and much more, has a house there. He was great to talk to. There are easily a half dozen other inspired people I could name and spent time with.
What are your future publishing plans?
To find a publisher for the manuscript of poems I finished.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — August 28, 2013
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.
Nineteen Lessons about Teaching
1. Teaching is a learning experience. Every time I teach a lesson, I learn the material in new and deeper way. I also always learn so much from my students. I learn from their own life experiences. I learn from their insights and reactions. They see aspects all the time in the sources we use that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise—and these are awesome teaching moments. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
New Infographic: Good News in Fair Use for Libraries
A new infographic from the Association of Research Libraries tells the story of library fair use and the Code of Best Practices in a clear and compelling way. There’s an embeddable PNG for your own blogs, and there’s also a print-ready 8½ x 11 inch version in case you need hardcopies to hand out at events. (Read more in ARL Policy Notes.)
Building Digital Humanities Projects for Everyone
Earlier this summer, the American Historical Association profiled a few recipients of National Endowment for the Humanities start-up grants to see what kinds of projects were emerging from the world of digital humanities with particular applications for historians. This month the organization caught up with a new cohort of implementation grantees, recently announced by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. (Read more from the American Historical Association.)
Van Gogh in 3D? A Replica Could Be Yours for £22,000
A poster of one of Van Gogh’s sunflowers is one of the traditional adornments to a student bedroom. The rest of us hang our reproductions with the knowledge that even the good ones are far from faithful to the originals—for which the going rate is £24 million. But not anymore. The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam has developed high-quality 3D reproductions of some of its finest paintings, with what it describes as the most advanced copying technique ever seen. (Read more in the Guardian.)
The Real Neuroscience of Creativity
You know how the left brain is realistic, analytical, practical, organized, and logical, and the right brain is creative, passionate, sensual, tasteful, colorful, vivid, and poetic? Thoughtful cognitive neuroscientists such as Rex Jung, Darya Zabelina, Andreas Fink, and others are on the forefront of investigating what actually happens in the brain during the creative process. And their findings are overturning conventional notions surrounding the neuroscience of creativity. (Read more in Scientific America.)
The Benefits of Flipping Your Classroom
A small but growing number of faculty at major universities are experimenting with the inverted or flipped classroom. It’s an instructional model popularized by, among other influences, a Ted Talk by the Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, which has received more than 2.5 million views. Institutions as varied as Duke University’s School of Medicine, Boston University’s College of Engineering, and the University of Washington School of Business are experimenting with changing from in-class lectures to video lectures and using class time to explore the challenging and more difficult aspects of course content. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)
Another Digital Divide
More students are being disciplined for sharing incendiary remarks through social media, drawing outraged responses from peers who say online interactions don’t dictate offline behavior. Despite the conflicting ideas of how students should behave on the internet, social-media etiquette is almost never discussed during first-year orientation. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Do Critics Paint Women Artists Out of the Picture?
Is there a glass ceiling for women in the arts? A glance by a visiting alien would see twenty-first-century Britain as one of the best places and times ever for women working as artists. I went to Rome for my holidays and gorged on paintings, frescoes, and statues, from ancient Roman mosaics to Canova nudes. None of these great works of art of ages gone by is credited to a woman—which doesn’t mean there were no women artists at all before modern times. (Read more in the Guardian.)
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — August 22, 2013
In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, historians, educators, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. Notable deaths this summer include four major internationally known artists: Ruth Asawa, Walter De Maria, León Ferrari, and Allan Sekula. In addition, CAA has published special obituaries on the Asian American art historian Sadayoshi “Sada” Omoto and the eminent Russian scholar Dmitrii V. Sarabianov.
- Ruth Asawa, an artist based in San Francisco who created abstract sculpture, including intricate hanging wire pieces and several public fountains, passed away on August 6, 2013. She was 87 years old
- Ronnie Cutrone, an artist and an assistant to Andy Warhol in the Factory from 1972 into the early 1980s, died on July 21, 2013. He was 65
- Walter De Maria, a sculptor best known for his large-scale outdoor work The Lightning Field and indoor pieces such as The New York Earth Room and The Broken Kilometer, died on July 25, 2013. He was 77 years old
- León Ferrari, an Argentine artist known for provocative work that addressed war, religion, power, and sex, died on July 25, 2013. He was 92 years old
- Betty Jones, a conservator of paintings at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum and for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, died on May 20, 2013, at age 94. She was instrumental in recovery efforts in Venice after the city was flooded in 1966
- Ben Lifson, a writer, curator, and photographer, passed away on July 3, 2013, at the age of 72. Lifson served as photography critic for the Village Voice from 1977 to 1982
- Larry Nowlan, a realist sculptor based in New Hampshire known for his bronze statue of the actor Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, sited outside New York’s Port Authority, died on July 30, 2013. He was 48 years old
- Sadayoshi “Sada” Omoto, a historian of American and Asian art who taught at Michigan State University for thirty-three years, died on March 4, 2013, at the age of 90. A special obituary on the scholar has been published by CAA
- John Reilly, the founder of a New York theater for underground video called the Global Village, died on July 28, 2013, age 74. Reilly financed documentary films and created his own, including Waiting for Beckett (1993), while also teaching workshops on video production
- Alejandro Santiago, a Mexican artist who worked on a series of small statues called 2501 Migrantes from 2002 to 2008, passed away on July 22, 2013. He was 49 years old
- Dmitrii V. Sarabianov, a Russian scholar who specialized in art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, passed away on July 19, 2013, age 89. CAA has published a special obituary on the eminent art historian
- Allan Sekula, an artist, photographer, writer, and longtime professor at California Institute of the Arts, died on August 10, 2013. He was 62 years old. Last year CAA honored Sekula with its Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art
- Jud Yalkut, a film and video artist based in Dayton, Ohio, died on July 23, 2013, at the age of 75. He founded the film and video program at Wright State University in 1973 and also taught at Sinclair Community College and Xavier University
Read all past obituaries in the arts in CAA News, which include special texts written for CAA. Please send links to published obituaries, or your completed texts, to Christopher Howard, CAA managing editor, for the next list.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — August 21, 2013
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 2013
The Chronicle of Higher Education takes the measure of higher education in its 2013–14 almanac, an annual compendium of data on colleges regarding the profession, students, diversity, finance, technology, and international issues. This year’s almanac features many new tables and charts along with the familiar ones. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
A Guide to the Web’s Growing Set of Free Image Collections
The J. Paul Getty Trust has launched its Open Content Program, making more than 4,600 high-quality images of artwork available for free online. Though works by van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Dürer had already fallen into the public domain, the Getty’s program makes their digital reproductions much easier to use. The Getty is not the first museum to put so many images online this year. The Atlantic has listed the museums and research institutions that have large, high-quality, free-to-use collections of historically or aesthetically notable images online. (Read more in the Atlantic).
Help Desk: Pressure to Review
I’m a new arts administrator and live in a midsized city. I started writing art reviews last year and now feel pressure to write about my artist friends’ work. It’s not like they are asking me directly, but hints have been dropped. I have no problem reviewing work that I think is good; the problem is that I like some people very much but don’t think their work is that great. How do I avoid reviewing work I don’t like without losing my friends? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Christie’s Appraisal Will Reveal Value of Detroit Institute of Arts’ Collection
Art museums treat estimated values of their art like state secrets. In fact, major museums such as the Detroit Institute of Arts don’t even know precisely what all of their multi-million-dollar treasures are worth. When officials from the New York–based auction house Christie’s finish formally appraising city-owned works in Detroit this fall, the results will open an unprecedented public window into the market value of thousands of artworks at a top American museum. (Read more in the Detroit Free Press.)
Feminist Anti-MOOC
At first glance, “Feminism and Technology” sounds like another massive open online open course (MOOC) that would involve video components and be available online to anyone, with no charge. But don’t look for this course in any MOOC catalogue. “Feminism and Technology” is taking a few MOOC elements but then changing them in ways consistent with feminist pedagogy to create a distributed open collaborative course (DOCC). (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
More Smiles? More Money
Last November, the artist Martha Rosler had her first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, an installation and performance piece called Meta-Monumental Garage Sale. It was, in fact, an enormous garage sale, with heaps of toys, furniture, clothes, and crockery arranged on a tidy maze of racks and tables winding through the museum’s main atrium. The show continued a project Rosler began in 1973 with Monumental Garage Sale, a performance she staged as a graduate student at UC San Diego and later re-created in museums all over the world. Like its predecessors, Meta-Monumental Garage Sale was a meditation on value. (Read more from N+1.)
Jasper Johns’s Assistant Charged with Stealing the Artist’s Work
In the twenty-seven years that James Meyer worked for Jasper Johns, the assistant answered the artist’s phone, stretched his canvases, bought his paintbrushes, and even drew lines on his canvases. Meyer was recently arrested for stealing at least twenty-two works from his employer and selling them through an unnamed New York gallery for $6.5 million, falsely telling the dealer and buyers that Johns had given them to him as presents and that they would be in the official catalogue raisonné. (Read more in New York Times.)
Pre-Raphaelite Mural Discovered in William Morris’s Red House
It began as an attempt to restore one blurry image that had been hidden for a century behind a large built-in wardrobe on William Morris’s bedroom wall. Months later, the painstaking removal of layers of paint and wallpaper revealed that an entire wall at the artist and craftsman’s first married home was painted by his young friends who would become world-famous Pre-Raphaelite artists. (Read more in the Guardian.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — August 14, 2013
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.
Florence Tomb Opened in Quest to Find “Mona Lisa”
Scientists in the Italian city of Florence have opened a tomb to extract DNA they hope will identify the model for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The tomb contains the family of Lisa Gherardini, a silk merchant’s wife who is believed to have sat for the artist. It is hoped that DNA will help to identify her from three skeletons found last year in a nearby convent. (Read more from BBC News.)
Open Content: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
The Getty has become an even more engaged digital citizen, one that shares its collections, research, and knowledge more openly than ever before. The institution has launched the Open Content Program to share—freely and without restriction—as many of its digital resources as possible. The program’s initial focus is to make available all images of public-domain artworks in the Getty’s collections. (Read more in the Getty Iris.)
Judge Upholds Artist’s Right to Photograph Unsuspecting Neighbors
New York’s Supreme Court has decided that the photographer Arne Svenson was within his rights to display and advertise a series of photographs he took of his neighbors without their permission. In May, a couple sued Svenson for violating their privacy after recognizing their young children in two of the images. The judge dismissed the suit, writing that the family’s right to privacy “yields to an artist’s protections under the First Amendment in the circumstances presented here.” (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
What’s a Blog Post Worth?
Which ultimately does more good: an article or monograph that is read by twenty or thirty people in a narrow field, or a blog post on a topic of interest to many (such as grading standards or tenure requirements) that is read by 200,000? What if the post spurs hundreds of comments, is debated publicly in faculty lounges and classrooms, and gets picked up by newspapers and websites across the country—in other words, it helps to shape the national debate over some hot-button issue? (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
A Mentoring Manifesto
“Transformative,” “career-changing,” and “life-altering”: are these words that tenure-track faculty members in your department use to describe the mentoring they receive? In this final column in the series on “How to Mentor New Faculty,” I want to lay out the biggest lessons that my department has learned about mentoring and encourage you to imagine how they might apply to your campus environment. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
A Page from Our Handbook: Writing about Your Work
Many of the materials you produce on behalf of your work—from artist’s statements to media releases to proposals to simple emails—involve a good bit of writing. In some cases you are writing about a project or series that you haven’t yet made. What you need to know in a nutshell is this: writing about your work is essential, but you can find a way to make it great, useful, more fun, and easier. (Read more from Creative Capital.)
The Utility of Bad Art
The father of consumer choice theory, Alfred Marshall, believed that the more of something you have the less of it you want: a phenomenon economists call diminishing marginal utility. However this was only taken to be the case for an individual at one point in time, not over his entire life. Addiction could prompt us to learn to like something if we consume more of it. The more we listen to good music, the more we want to buy. Modern economists are more skeptical about our aesthetic judgment. (Read more in the Economist.)
Ten of the Most Expensive Artworks on Amazon Art
Amazon has embarked on what might be its classiest endeavor yet: a fine-arts marketplace. Yes, the internet’s behemoth middleman is working with more than 150 galleries and 4,500 artists to offer a wide variety of paintings, photographs, and mixed-media masterpieces to online shopping addicts everywhere. While critics have been quick to comment on the strange partnership between a giant internet marketplace and the insular fine-arts world, this gallery experiment could have a positive impact. (Read more in the Huffington Post.)
caa.reviews Publishes Multimedia Project on Bernini Exhibition
posted by Christopher Howard — August 13, 2013
Celebrating its fifteenth anniversary as a born-digital journal this fall, caa.reviews continues its exploration of the scholarly review medium through “Exhibitions Close Up—Bernini: Sculpting in Clay.” This multimedia, open-access project focuses on the recent exhibition that assembles over forty small terra-cotta models made by the Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini to visualize large sculptures. The project was made possible through a grant to CAA from the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.
Conceived by Sheryl Reiss, editor-in-chief of caa.reviews, and broadened through discussion with the journal’s editorial board, the project explores the Bernini exhibition in several ways. It provides a traditional scholarly review of the presentation at both its venues—the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas—and a review by the sculptor Denise Pelletier. Central to the project is a video walk-through at the Kimbell that juxtaposes close views of Bernini’s terra-cotta models with physical movement within the gallery spaces and around the objects on display, giving the viewer a close approximation of visiting the exhibition in person. The project—which also includes a bibliography, previously published essays on and reviews of Bernini’s work and methods from The Art Bulletin and caa.reviews, additional educational videos about the artist’s work, the Kimbell floor plan of the exhibition, comparative illustrations showing completed pieces, and an interview with C. D. Dickerson, curator of European art at the Kimbell—provides a comprehensive resource for Bernini’s oeuvre and influence as well as an in-depth look at an important monographic exhibition.
The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture (ANVC) developed the Scalar digital authoring platform with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Art Bulletin also used this platform for an anniversary project launched in February 2013, called “Publishing The Art Bulletin: Past, Present, and Future,” that was developed by Thelma Thomas, (then) chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board and associate professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Additional projects using the Scalar platform can be viewed on the ANVC website.
The minimum browser requirements for “Exhibitions Close Up—Bernini: Sculpting in Clay” are Internet Explorer 9.0, Firefox 4.0, Chrome 7.0, and Safari 5.0.
August 2013 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — August 12, 2013
Each month, CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts produces a curated list, called CWA Picks, of recommended exhibitions and events related to feminist art and scholarship in North America and around the world.
The CWA Picks for August 2013 consist of several excellent exhibitions of women artists in Europe and the United States: Linder Sterling in Hanover, Germany; Elaine Sturtevant and Dame Laura Knight in London, England; and Josephine Meckseper in Southampton, New York. Also included are two important group shows: Mother Armenia in Yerevan, Armenia, and Autorotratti in Bologna, Italy.
Check the archive of CWA Picks at the bottom of the page, as several museum and gallery shows listed in previous months may still be on view or touring.
Image Caption
Dame Laura Knight, Self Portrait, 1913. National Portrait Gallery (artwork © Estate of Dame Laura Knight DBE RA).
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — August 07, 2013
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.
The Young Wellesley Professor Who Invented Contemporary Art
When you think of the cities that helped define cutting-edge art in the twentieth century, you think of Paris, New York, maybe Berlin. In the standard histories, Boston plays a decidedly background role, with the city’s gatekeepers ensuring that the wild works by artists like Picasso, Braque, or Mondrian didn’t soil their elegant private and public collections. “Boston is very dead so far as contemporary art is concerned,” complained a young Wellesley art-history instructor, Alfred Barr Jr., writing to a friend and gallery owner in New York in 1926, well after modernism had caught fire elsewhere. (Read more in the Boston Globe.)
How to Build a Digital Humanities Took in a Week
Twelve scholars convened at the George Mason University last week to build a web application for the digital humanities as part of the “One Week | One Tool” challenge, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The participants—who included web developers, faculty members, museum professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, and a high-school librarian—spent five days brainstorming, designing, and developing their tool. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Arts Majors Jump Ahead of Tech Grads in Landing Jobs
Here’s a surprise for college students: recent graduates with technology degrees are having a tougher time finding a job than their peers in the arts. The unemployment rate for recent grads with a degree in information systems is more than double that of drama and theater majors, at 14.7 percent vs. 6.4 percent, according to a recent Georgetown University study. Even for computer science majors, the jobless rate for recent grads nears 9 percent. (Read more in USA Today.)
Protecting Detroit’s Artwork Is a Job for Detroit
By now, everybody knows that the city of Detroit has finally filed for bankruptcy—and everybody in the art world knows that its museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, is in deep trouble. Here’s why: Detroit owes roughly $18 billion that it doesn’t have. The sixty-thousand-plus works of art in the permanent collection are owned by the city, not the museum (as is normally the case). According to the Detroit Free Press, the thirty-eight most important pieces have a market value of about $2.5 billion. What next? (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)
Only the Artists Can Save the Arts Critics
How do you put a price on thought? How do you price an opinion? How do you even price the creative thought that the opinion was formed on? How do you do this in a culture—I think that’s the right word—where people are used not only to getting opinion for nothing, but expect good information for nothing as well? (Read more in the Guardian.)
Caveat Emptor: An Art Exhibit Made Entirely of Forgeries Confiscated by the FBI
Upon entering Caveat Emptor you will likely recognize the exhibition’s work with confidence. Iconic pieces made famous by art legends such as Chagall, Warhol, Gauguin, and de Kooning adorn the walls, and yet, you probably haven’t heard of a single artist showing. That’s right, Caveat Emptor, which translates to “let the buyer beware,” is composed entirely of forgeries that have been confiscated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Read more in the Huffington Post.)
The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Midcentury Books Vanish
Last year I wrote about research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: there were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections—which cover titles published in 1923 and after—had squashed the market for books from the mid-twentieth century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public. (Read more in the Atlantic.)
Did You Hear That? It Was Art
Nothing? Listen again. Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall. And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. (Read more in the New York Times.)