CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — June 26, 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.
Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm
A new national corps of “master teachers” trained in the humanities and social sciences and increased support for research in “endangered” liberal-arts subjects are among the recommendations of a major report delivered last week on Capitol Hill. The report comes amid concern about low humanities enrollments and worries that the Obama administration’s emphasis on science education risks diminishing a huge source of the nation’s intellectual strength. (Read more in the New York Times.)
The Humanities “Crisis”—Are Museums and Higher Education Doing All They Can?
Our public museums and libraries and our colleges and universities occupy a privileged cultural space and have earned respect born of their missions to foster and disseminate knowledge. By historical standards, public museums and libraries have been open institutions, and more people than ever are taking advantage of higher education. But what is possible in terms of scale and what constitutes “open” have moved fast and far recently. To date, most museums, colleges, and universities have not yet embraced the radical expansion to their missions that is now possible. (Read more in e-Literate.)
Do Unpaid Internships Lead to Jobs? Not for College Students
The common defense of the unpaid internship is that, even if the role doesn’t exactly pay, it will pay off eventually in the form of a job. Turns out, the data suggests that defense is wrong, at least when it comes to college students. For three years, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked graduating seniors if they’ve received a job offer and if they’ve ever had either a paid or unpaid internship. And for three years, it’s reached the same conclusion: unpaid internships don’t seem to give college kids much of a leg up when it comes time to look for employment. (Read more in the Atlantic.)
What Job-Placement Data Would Be Useful?
What data on the job placement of PhDs would be most useful to prospective graduate students and job candidates? “Any data at all,” came the reply from one respondent to an informal survey on graduate-school placement. The sense of frustration with the lack of reliable information was clear in the responses. The survey asked, “What data would be the most useful to you on the job-placement rates of individual PhD programs?” One respondent replied, “honest data; no lies.” Another wrote: “Any data would have been nice. I was given the impression that a PhD would lead to a job, but now I know that isn’t the case at all.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Half of Faculty Say Their Job Is More Difficult Today Than Five Years Ago
If you find yourself working longer hours or maybe feeling a bit more stressed at the end of the day, you’re not alone. Fifty percent of college faculty who completed the annual Faculty Focus reader survey said that their job is more difficult than it was five years ago. Only nine percent said their job is less difficult, while 33 percent said it’s about the same. (Read more in Faculty Focus.)
Arts and Culture Was Fastest-Growing Philanthropic Cause in 2012
Arts and culture was Americans’ fastest-growing charitable cause in 2012, rising an estimated 7.8 percent to $14.44 billion, according to a leading annual research report on charitable giving. Donations to education rose second fastest, with a 7 percent gain, according to the latest edition of Giving USA, issued last week by the Chicago-based Giving Institute and its research partner, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
Help Desk: Getting Schooled
I’m an artist in my mid-twenties who has absolutely no formal education. So far I’ve managed to be fairly happy with small but very meaningful visibility, knowing that art making is about process and that it takes time to find one’s self. But I’m starting to hit a wall regarding the growth of my practice and am worried that my lack of “training” might be the problem, so I’m considering going to art school. How important do you think education is in order for someone to be or to become a professional artist? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Art Museums Better Hurry Up and Get Ready for the Future of 3D Printing
In his living room in San Diego right now, Cosmo Wenman has two life-sized reproductions of the British Museum’s Head of a Horse of Selene, a magnificently lifelike sculpture with flared nostrils that dates to about 432 BC. The original in Britain is made of marble, about three feet end to end. Wenman’s copies, created with an older digital camera and a MakerBot 3D printer, are clearly reproductions as soon as you lift them up. Created in plastic and coated in a bronze patina, they weigh about eight pounds each. (Read more in the Atlantic.)
Contribute to the Art Bulletin Publication Fund
posted by Christopher Howard — June 25, 2013
As you may already know, 2013 marks the one hundredth anniversary of The Art Bulletin, CAA’s first print publication and a preeminent scholarly journal for the history of art and visual studies. The Art Bulletin covers the full range of art history in essays by some of the world’s most acclaimed scholars of art. Essays from The Art Bulletin have been staples in art-history courses at colleges and universities for decades, and the journal continues to support exemplary scholarship in all areas of art history.
In honor of this important anniversary, CAA invites you to make a contribution to the Art Bulletin Publication Fund. Contributions of $50 or more made before July 1, 2013, will be acknowledged with a special thank you in the September issue, and contributions of $250 or more will be acknowledged in four consecutive issues and on the CAA website for twelve months.
Please join CAA in celebrating The Art Bulletin’s longstanding excellence as a leader in art-historical scholarship. We look forward to many years to come.
Report Warns against Declining Emphasis on Humanities and Social Sciences
posted by Christopher Howard — June 19, 2013
Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Washington, DC, turned a spotlight on the urgent need to refocus the country on maintaining national excellence in the humanities and social sciences—and how failure to do so will have consequences at home and abroad for the future of American education, security, and competitiveness.
Senators Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Mark Warner (D-VA) and Representatives Tom Petri (R-WI) and David Price (D-NC) came together on Capitol Hill this morning to accept a report, prepared at their request, by the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Today’s release of the report, titled The Heart of the Matter, launches a national conversation about the importance of the humanities and social sciences to America’s future. Presented by the commission’s cochairs—Richard H. Brodhead, president of Duke University, and John Rowe, retired chairman and chief executive officer of Exelon Corporation—the report looks at the vital role of the humanities and social sciences in preparing and sustaining Americans for the responsibility of productive citizenship in the United States and the world.
The Heart of the Matter focuses on five areas of concern: K–12 education; two- and four-year colleges; research; cultural institutions and lifelong learning; and international security and competitiveness. It also makes recommendations to achieve three goals:
1. Educate Americans in the knowledge, skills, and understanding needed to thrive in a twenty-first-century democracy:
- Invest in the preparation of citizens with a thorough grounding in history, civics, and social studies
- Increase access to online resources, including teaching materials
2. Foster an innovative, competitive, and strong society:
- To ensure the vibrancy of humanities and social-science programs at all levels, philanthropists, states, and the federal government should significantly increase funding designated for these purposes
- Create a Humanities Master Teacher Corps to complement the STEM Master Teacher Corps recently proposed by the White House
3. Equip the nation for leadership in an interconnected world:
- Develop a “Culture Corps” that would match interested adults (retirees, veterans, artists, library and museum personnel) with schools, community centers, and other organizations to transmit humanistic and social-scientific expertise from one generation to the next
- Expand education in international affairs and transnational studies
“The American character is defined not by ethnicity—Americans come from many countries, races, religions, and cultures—but by a common set of ideals and principles that unite us as a country,” said Senator Alexander. “Those ideals and principles have always been shared and learned through the study of history, philosophy, and literature, but today their study is at risk. This report is a first step to highlighting the importance of, and ensuring a future for, our nation’s humanities education—and our unique American character as well.”
Senator Warner added, “I commend all the members of the commission for their hard work on The Heart of the Matter. Having a strong knowledge of civics, comprehensive reading and writing skills, and an appreciation of history are important for a well-rounded member of the twenty-first-century world. We must use this report as a foundation to continue to engage with the public on how best to keep our humanities and social sciences robust.”
Congressman Petri noted, “Knowledge and promotion of the humanities and social sciences are absolutely important so that citizens have a firm understanding of our nation’s unique history, culture, and heritage. I hope the recommendations in this report will be seriously considered to improve the teaching and understanding of the humanities and social sciences.”
“The humanities and social sciences help us understand where we’ve come from and who we are as a people, and that understanding points us toward the endeavors we must undertake to help every person reach their full potential,” said Representative Price. “Studies in these areas are critically important to a well-rounded education and the future of our country. This report comes at a crucial moment, and I hope it will help raise the profile of the humanities, provide a better understanding of their value, and spur a national conversation about how the humanities and social sciences keep our nation strong and competitive.”
“Today’s leaders in business, government, the military, and diplomacy must be able to analyze, interpret, communicate, and understand other cultures,” said Brodhead, cochair of the commission. “This report will remind Americans that a broad-based and balanced education, integrating the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences, is the best way to equip our citizens to approach the complex problems of our rapidly changing world.”
“The humanities and social sciences comprise many of the things that give life meaning,” said commission cochair Rowe, “both at the highest level and in our day-to-day activities. They need more public and private support and compared to other things a little money goes a long way.”
A short companion film, The Heart of the Matter, from the Emmy Award–winning Ewers Brothers Productions was also released today. Appearing in the film are the producer, screenwriter, and director George Lucas, the actor John Lithgow, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and the documentary filmmaker Ken Burns.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a steadfast supporter of the humanities and arts in this country, provided primary funding for the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. The Carnegie Corporation of New York also provided important funding.
The views expressed in the report are those of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences and not necessarily those of the officers and fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — June 19, 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 New World of Net Art
When internet art first emerged in the early 1990s, it was regarded as something that dealt almost exclusively with the architecture of the World Wide Web itself. During that period, the German-born Wolfgang Staehle constructed The Thing, an electronic bulletin-board system that served as a forum for discussions about and dissemination of what was referred to as “net art.” But as the web has evolved, so too has the notion of what might be considered internet art. (Read more in ARTnews.)
Internet Real Estate, Art, and Power: The Cases of Artsy and .art
The forthcoming introduction of generic top-level domains—which will replace the .com or .net suffix with specific words or terms, such as .food, .movies, or .microsoft—poses new speculative opportunities as dizzying as those of Zola’s nineteenth-century Paris. Last year, e-flux announced that it had applied to manage the proposed .art domain. The application fee alone was $185,000, and the successful applicant will pay ICANN a further $25,000 per year. There is clearly money to be made in top-level domains, but the management of .art may be more than a business; it holds within it the power to act as gatekeeper. (Read more from Rhizome.)
2011: Michael Sanchez on Art and Transmission
Are we living in an aftermath? The unspoken consensus seems to be that, in relation to the art of the previous decade, the early 2010s are a caesura—a waiting period at best, analogous to the early 1970s in relation to the ’60s, or the early ’90s in relation to the ’80s. Those older historical moments were not just lulls, however, but scenes of profound discursive and technological mutation. And likewise, over the past few years, a set of technical innovations have arisen that have reconfigured conditions for the production and distribution of art. (Read more in Artforum.)
Smart Phones and Academic Research
For academics, smart-phone cameras can be used to gather and document information during field research, augment presentations, and connect to a wider audience through the myriad of communities online. Scholars in fields as different as clinical medicine and art are using smart-phone technology to not only aid in research, but also to share their findings with people who would not otherwise be engaged with their academic research. (Read more in Just Publics @365.)
Google Leads Search for Humanities PhD Graduates
Those worried about the value of studying the arts and humanities, particularly at the postgraduate level, take heart: Google wants you. In a boldly titled talk at a recent conference at Stanford University, Damon Horowitz, director of engineering—and in-house philosopher—at Google, discussed the question of “Why you should quit your technology job and get a humanities PhD.” (Read more in Times Higher Education.)
Connoisseurship, Physics Envy, and the Wages of Error
What is the nature of connoisseurship as a form of knowledge, and how precisely does it differ from other fields? To what special forms of cognitive error is it prone? What does the art historian do to arrive at an attribution when there is no evidence to go on other than what is before our eyes? (Read more from Neil Jeffares.)
Learning from Taksim Square: Architecture, State Power, and Public Space in Istanbul
In a matter of days, “Taksim Square” has become a household name akin to Tahrir Square, shorthand for a youthful protest movement against the brutality of state power in the Middle East. What began as a peaceful sit-in to protest the uprooting of trees from Gezi Park, one of Istanbul’s last open green spaces near Taksim Square, has morphed into a broader Occupy movement against the Turkish government. For an architectural historian, it is no accident that the great plans to remake Taksim, as well as the protestors’ speeches and actions, often invoke history and architectural memory to buttress their arguments in the present. (Read more in the SAH Blog.)
Just Look at the Data, If You Can Find Any
Advisers and prospective students need something more than a scattered helping of infrequently updated best-case scenarios. We need externally verified, reasonably comprehensive data about individual programs and maybe even individual advisers. Aggregated data about graduate schools have limited usefulness when individual programs have such variability in their placement outcomes. Also, aggregated data place little pressure on individual universities to reform themselves. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — June 18, 2013
In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, designers, scholars, professors, museum directors, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. Notable deaths this month include the former Guggenheim Museum director Thomas M. Messer and a dealer, curator, and publisher of Conceptual art, Seth Siegelaub.
- Cerna “Chickie” Alter, a corporate art consultant who established her Chicago-area business in the 1960s, died on May 10, 2013. She was 74
- Ralph Brown, a British sculptor of figurative works in clay, plaster, metal, and marble, died on April 3, 2013, at age 84
- Anne Bryan, an artist and a student of painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, died on June 5, 2013. She was 24 years old
- William T. Cartwright, a documentary filmmaker and producer who bought and preserved the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, died on June 1, 2013. He was 92
- Roberto Chabet, a curator and the founding director of the Cultural Center of the Philippines who taught for more than thirty years in the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines, died on April 30, 2013. Known as the father of conceptual art in his country, he was 76 years old
- Niels Diffrient, an industrial designer who worked on the Princess telephone, John Deere tractor seats, the Polaroid SX-70 camera, and American Airlines jet interiors, died on June 8, 2013, at age 84
- Bruce Evans, a curator and museum director who worked at the Dayton Art Institute from 1965 to 1991, died on May 14, 2013, at 72. He also led the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, North Carolina, and served as president of the Association of Art Museum Directors
- Dawn Glanz, a historian of American and European art who taught in the School of Art at Bowling Green State University for twenty-five years, passed away on May 9, 2013. She was 66
- Michael Harrison, head of fine art at Winchester School of Art and director of Kettle’s Yard, a contemporary-art center in Cambridge, England, from 1992 to 2011, died on April 25, 2013. He was 65
- Ray Harryhausen, an influential stop-motion animator for films such as Mighty Joe Young (1949), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), One Million Years BC (1966), and Clash of the Titans (1981), passed away on May 7, 2013. He was 92
- Jimmy Jalapeeno, a painter and photographer based in Texas who earned two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, died on May 22, 2013. He was 66 years old
- Farideh Lashai, an Iranian painter of gestural abstractions and the author of a compelling autobiographical novel called Shal Bamu (2003), died on February 24, 2013, at age 68
- Lee Littlefield, a Houston-based artist known for his “Pop-Up” sculptural works alongside Interstate 10 in Texas, died on June 9, 2013. He was 77 years old
- Mollie Lyman, a professor of art who taught in the Art Department at Emory University for over thirty years as well as at the Atlanta College of Art, passed away on April 13, 2013. She was 87
- Kim Merker, a designer, typesetter, and printer of hand-pressed books of poetry, died on April 28, 2013, at age 81. He founded Stone Wall Press in 1957 and the Windhover Press at the University of Iowa ten years later
- Thomas M. Messer, a director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from 1961 to 1988 who oversaw the acquisition of the Thannhauser Collection and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, died on May 15, 2013, at the age of 93
- Wayne F. Miller, a photographer who documented the Second World War for the US Navy and captured the experiences of black residents living on the South Side of Chicago, died on May 22, 2013. He was 94
- Otto Muehl, a controversial Austrian artist, died on May 26, 2013, at age 87. With several others, Muehl founded Viennese Actionism in the early 1960s
- Angela Paterakis, a professor of art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for nearly fifty years, died on May 19, 2013. She was 80 years old
- William Plunkett, a British designer and manufacturer of modern furniture, died on May 5, 2013. He was 84
- Richard Rousseau, the founder and owner of Artist Hardware, a design and development firm, and a former product manager at Blick Art Materials, passed away on May 31, 2013. He was 46 years old
- Dale R. Roylance, a curator at Princeton University who organized more than one hundred exhibitions in the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library, died on May 19, 2013, age 88. Roylance also served as curator of the arts of the book at Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library
- Betty Rogers Rubenstein, an art historian and a former art critic for the Tallahassee Democrat, passed away on May 19, 2013. She was 92
- Elizabeth Foster Schoyer, a former member of the Women’s Committee at the Carnegie Museum of Art and a longtime museum docent, died on June 10, 2013. She was 94
- Seth Siegelaub, an adventurous dealer of Conceptual art, a producer and publisher of artists’ projects, and an expert in textiles, died on June 15, 2013, at the age of 71
- Vollis Simpson, a self-taught artist based in North Carolina who created large sculptural works called whirligigs with materials from junkyards, passed away on May 31, 2013. He was 94
- Willi Sitte, an East German artist who worked in a Social Realist style, died on June 8, 2013, at age 92. Sitte served as president of his former country’s association of visual artists from 1974 to 1988
- Dorothea Wight, an artist, printmaker, and teacher who operated Studio Prints, an intaglio workshop in London, died on May 23, 2013. She was 68
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.
NEA Releases New Research Tool on Working Artists
posted by Christopher Howard — June 13, 2013
What do we know about the 2.1 million artists in the United States’ labor force? To help answer that question, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has released Equal Opportunity Data Mining: National Statistics about Working Artists. This new online research tool offers seventy searchable tables with figures on working artists by state and metropolitan area, by demographic information (including race and ethnicity, age, gender, and disability status), and by residence and workplace. The public is welcome to investigate the tables, a map of state-level rankings, and links to original sources.
“Artists represent just 1.4 percent of the labor force, but they have an outsized role as entrepreneurs and innovators who contribute to the vitality of the communities where they live and work,” said the NEA’s acting chairman, Joan Shigekawa. “These data add further detail and nuance to our understanding of the profile of American artists.”
This new research resource gives statistical profiles of Americans who reported an artist occupation as their primary job, whether full-time, part-time, or self-employed. The data set looks at artists in eleven distinct occupations: actors; announcers; architects; art directors, fine artists, and animators; dancers and choreographers; designers; entertainers and performers; musicians; photographers; producers and directors; and writers and authors. Some tables offer data on employed artists in particular, while other tables measure all artists in the workforce, both employed and looking for work.
The NEA created these data sets based on the US Census Bureau’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Tables. Every ten years, the Census Bureau produces EEO tables using data from its annual American Community Survey (ACS). This set of EEO tables is drawn from the ACS survey results for 2006–10, which were combined to obtain a large enough sample. The EEO tables are the federal standard for comparing the race, ethnicity, and gender composition of the labor market in specific geographic areas and job categories.
Equal Opportunity Data Mining is the first installment of a series of Arts Data Profile webpages that the NEA will release over the next several months. Future NEA Arts Data Profiles will introduce public data about arts participation and arts organizations, and additional data on artists in the workforce.
Some findings that emerge from the EEO tables include:
- One-fourth of all American architects are women. Yet in Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, and Washington, the share is roughly one-third. By contrast, in Arkansas, West Virginia, and Wyoming, nearly all architects are men
- Nationally, 4 percent of all artists are disabled, compared with 6 percent of the labor force. At 7 percent, the share of dancers and musicians with a disability is somewhat higher. The percentage of working musicians with a disability is comparatively high in Alaska (25 percent), Alabama (14 percent), Kentucky (16 percent), and Wisconsin (13 percent)
- In Oregon, 40 percent of working actors are African American, Asian, Native American, Pacific Islander, or other, while these ethnic and racial groups make up only 20 percent of the total Oregon labor force
- Roughly one-quarter of musicians working in Nashville commute to the city from outside areas. For example, an estimated one hundred musicians commute thirteen miles from Hendersonville (Sumner County); twenty musicians commute from Franklin, and an additional sixty-five musicians commute to Nashville from other parts of Williamson County
The research tool also includes a video tutorial, links to additional resources (such as the US Census Bureau’s American Fact Finder page), and surveys and databases from the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For more than thirty years, the NEA has been the only federal agency to use US Census data to analyze artists in the workforce. The NEA seeks to extend the conversation on arts research through commissioned research, direct research grants, and research convenings to encourage more rigorous research on the impact of the arts in other domains of American life, such as education, health and well-being, community livability, and economic prosperity. Recent endeavors include a landmark partnership between the NEA and the US Bureau of Economic Analysis to develop an Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account that will identify and calculate the arts and culture sector’s contributions to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The NEA has convened seventeen federal agencies in the NEA Interagency Task Force on the Arts and Human Development, to foster more research on the arts’ role in improving health and educational outcomes throughout the lifespan. Just published, Creative Communities from Brookings Institution Press is based on a first-ever convening between the NEA and the Brookings Institution on the arts and economic development.
About the National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts was established by Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. To date, the NEA has awarded more than $4 billion to support artistic excellence, creativity, and innovation for the benefit of individuals and communities. The NEA extends its work through partnerships with state arts agencies, local leaders, other federal agencies, and the philanthropic sector.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — June 12, 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.
When Artworks Crash: Restorers Face Digital Test
Paintings fade; sculptures chip. Art restorers have long known how to repair those material flaws, so the experience of looking at a Vermeer or a Rodin remains basically unchanged over time. But when creativity is computerized, the art isn’t so easy to fix. For instance, when a web-based work becomes technologically obsolete, does updated software simply restore it? Or is the piece fundamentally changed? (Read more in the New York Times.)
Crowdfunding Academic Research
When a professor from a small liberal-arts college in central Pennsylvania decided to take on a massive research project two summers ago, he went through the usual, often futile, process of applying for federal and private grants. But when funds were short a year later, he went down a nontraditional route—turning to the public and the internet for help. In fifty days, Juniata College’s Chris Grant and his research partner, Gina Lamendella, raised $10,800 through a crowdfunding website called iAMscientist. (Read more in Insider Higher Ed.)
Self-Sabotage in the Academic Career
Pogo recognized long ago that we often are our own worst enemies. Sure, he was a cartoon character, but he had a point—especially in higher education, where self-sabotage seems to be a standard characteristic of academic careers. In my thirty years as a professor, five years as a dean, and three years as a provost, I have observed many academics harm their own careers, often without realizing it. Here are fifteen ways in which you can be most self-destructive. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Help Desk: Curating Like a Fool
I’m an artist and art writer and would like to complete the trifecta by seriously trying to curate. However, since I’ve only been on the curated side of the table, I know embarrassingly little about the nitty-gritty of it. For example, when I have a proposal ready, do I inform the proposed artists of my intentions before or after I submit the proposal? Who arranges and pays for shipping work? I only know how I’ve personally been treated and not what is typical. I’m too afraid of looking like a fool to give it a shot. (Read more in Daily Serving.)
“Stuff Matters”: The Crucial Work of the AIC’s Collections Emergency Response Team
The Collections Emergency Response Team, says Eric Pourchot, institutional advancement director at the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, “came out of the experience we had after Hurricane Katrina, as many of our members from AIC had served on teams that went down to the New Orleans and Gulf Coast area to help cultural institutions recover as best they could from that disaster.” (Read more in Can You Dig It?.)
Are Video Games the Next Great Art Form?
In 2005, the late film critic Roger Ebert created a storm of controversy when he wrote that video games could never be art. While Ebert wasn’t the first person to address the subject, he was one of the first mainstream critics to do so, and his statement set off a rash of essays, blog posts, and talks arguing for (few) and against (many) his position. The subject has drifted in and out of popular culture ever since, with different scholars weighing in here and there. Recently, a number of museums, including the Smithsonian and MoMA, staged exhibitions featuring video games as art, throwing the topic into focus again. (Read more in Pacific Standard.)
Experimenting with Facebook in the College Classroom
While discussing the nuances of regression analysis, I saw some of my students smiling. It wasn’t a smile of understanding; it was a response to seeing a Facebook comment on their smart phone. I later learned that 99 percent of the students in the research method class were Facebook users, routinely checking for updates ten to twenty times a day. The next semester, I decided to embrace social media and created a Facebook page for the class, which was comprised of twenty-five students. It was actually fun and easy. In less than two hours, I had created a page with relevant material for the course. (Read more in Faculty Focus.)
The Deduction for Charitable Contributions: The Sacred Cow of the Tax Code?
In his most recent budget proposal, President Barack Obama seeks to impose a cap on itemized deductions in the personal income tax return—which includes the deduction for charitable contributions. This provision, part of the administration’s strategy to raise revenue to pay for government spending, has been a part of every White House budget proposal since 2009, and every year arts advocacy organizations join the rest of the nonprofit sector in opposing the changes. So far, the cap has been successfully warded off, but there’s growing concern that if Republicans and Democrats ever agree on sweeping tax reforms, the charitable deduction will be on the chopping block. (Read more in Createquity.)
June 2013 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — June 11, 2013
The June 2013 Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, is the second issue of the journal’s centennial year. In “Regarding Art and Art History,” Cecelia F. Klein ponders Precolumbian art and the canon. “Notes from the Field” offers short essays on the subject of mimesis by Dexter Dalwood, Suzanne Preston Blier, Daniela Bohde, Helen C. Evans, Sarah E. Fraser, Thomas Habinek, Tom Huhn, Jeanette Kohl, Niklaus Largier, Peter Mack, and Alex Potts. The June interviewee is Timon Screech, who discusses fantasies and foreign contact in the art history of Japan with Yukio Lippit.
In their essay “An Émigré Art Historian and America: H. W. Janson,” Elizabeth Sears and Charlotte Schoell-Glass explore institutional art history in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of the American career of the German-born author of the classic survey text, History of Art. Emine Fetvaci’s “From Print to Trace” considers why the Ottoman creators of a 1579 book of imperial portraits may have consulted European models, raising questions about the understanding of the portrait as a visual document and the concepts that underpinned it.
Analyzing the intricate iconography of an illustrated thesis print on the system of natural philosophy by the seventeenth-century Franciscan professor Martin Meurisse, Susanna Berger demonstrates the complex uses of imagery in philosophy education in early modern France. Viccy Coltman studies a group of portraits of the Frasers of Reeling, a Scottish Highland family, by the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Scottish artist Henry Raeburn to reveal an understanding of portrait likeness as present and prescient in the global British Empire. Finally, in “The Cultural Politics of the Brushstroke” Martin Powers examines the debates between and among European, American, and Chinese intellectuals over some four centuries in order to deconstruct the seductive rhetoric of the brushstroke as employed in both “East” and “West.”
In the Reviews section, Charles Palermo considers three books on fin-de-siècle culture in Europe: Dario Gamboni’s The Brush and the Pen: Odilon Redon and Literature, Linda Goddard’s Aesthetic Rivalries: Word and Image in France, 1880–1926, and Anna Sigrídur Arnar’s The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the Transformation of Print Culture. Next, Bridget Alsdorf reviews Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner’s edited volume, The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, and Bolaji Campbell assesses David T. Doris’s Vigilant Things: On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and the Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria.
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 next issue of the quarterly publication, to appear in September 2013, will feature essays on, among other topics, Albrecht Dürer, Horace Walpole, Tanaka Atsuko, and public fountains in nineteenth-century Havana.
Getty Foundation Funds a Third Year of CAA’s International Travel Grant Program
posted by Christopher Howard — June 10, 2013
The Getty Foundation has awarded CAA a major grant to fund the International Travel Grant Program for a third consecutive year. The foundation’s support will enable CAA to bring twenty international visual-arts professionals to the 102nd Annual Conference taking place February 12–15, 2014, in Chicago. CAA’s International Travel Grant Program supports art historians, artists who teach art history, and museum curators, and provides the grantees with funds for travel expenses, hotel accommodations, per diems, conference registrations, and one-year CAA memberships. The program will include a one-day preconference meeting to be held on February 11, 2014, providing grant recipients and their hosts with the opportunity to address their common professional interests and issues.
The goal of the International Travel Grant Program is to increase international participation in CAA and to diversify the organization’s membership, which now includes members from seventy-five nations. CAA also strives to familiarize international participants with the submission process for conference sessions and foster collaboration among American art historians, artists, and curators and their international colleagues. As in previous years, members of CAA’s International Committee and the National Committee for the History of Art have agreed to host the program participants.
Grant guidelines and the 2014 application can be found on the CAA website. Professionals who have not previously attended a CAA conference are especially encouraged to apply. Applicants do not need to be CAA members. This grant program is not open to graduate students or to those participating in the 2014 conference as chairs, speakers, or discussants. The deadline for applications has been extended to August 23, 2013.
For information on applying to the International Travel Grant Program, please contact its project director, Janet Landay, at jlanday@collegeart.org or 212-392-4420.
Image: Two International Travel Grant recipients and their CAA hosts at the 2013 Annual Conference. From left to right: Elaine O’Brien (CAA host), Venny Nakazibwe (with back turned, from Uganda), Trinidad Perez (Ecuador), and Ann Albritton (host and chair of CAA’s International Committee) (photograph by Bradley Marks)
June 2013 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — June 06, 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 June 2013 comprise seven solo exhibitions, most of them bringing together work spanning an artist’s career. In Manhattan, PPOW Gallery is presenting examples from several series by the pioneering feminist artist Carolee Schneemann, and Broadway 1602 has gathered several historical installations by Nicola L, an underrecognized French artist based in New York. Work made by Nicole Eisenman since 2009 is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum in California, and Eve Sussman is the subject of a survey at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach, Florida. In Europe, Ellen Gallagher is having a midcareer retrospective at Tate Modern in London, VALIE EXPORT is showing work related to touch (i.e., physical contact) in Berlin, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm is focusing on Niki de Saint Phalle’s interest in the girl, the monster, and the goddess.
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: Niki de Saint Phalle, Could we have loved?, 1968 (artwork © Niki de Saint Phalle/BUS 2013)