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.

The Exit Interview: Frank Goodyear and Anne Collins Goodyear

They did not arrive at the Smithsonian together, but Frank H. Goodyear III and Anne Collins Goodyear, longtime curators at the National Portrait Gallery, are leaving it as a pair. After twelve years at the museum, this husband-and-wife team will begin their tenure as codirectors of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, in June. (Read more in the Washington Post.)

Detroit Museum Not the First to Consider Selling Out

Museums sell works all the time but typically not their best stuff. When they do sell, it’s to get rid of pieces that don’t suit the collection. They use the money to buy new works that are a better fit. They’re not supposed to use the money to buy computers or pay down debt, according to industry standards. But when museums aren’t freestanding institutions, as is the case in Detroit, the larger entities that control them sometimes can’t help but see dollar signs. (Read more from National Public Radio.)

A Step in the Wrong Direction—or False Advertising?

What comes after crowd sourcing and crowd funding? Crowd deaccessioning, of course. Yup, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens has opened an exhibition of five paintings from its collection by the French artist Bernard Smol (1897–1969). The museum wants to keep just one of them because of “limited storage space and evolving collecting philosophy.” (Read more in Real Clear Arts.)

“You Become Better with Age”

At what age do people hit their stride professionally? Categorically speaking, athletes, engineers, politicians, television writers, salesmen, and actresses all have varying norms and shelf lives, sometimes affected by physical attributes or societal expectations. Seemingly immune to ageist perceptions and traditional notions of retirement are artists. A historical look reveals that a striking number have been highly productive and turned out some of their best work late into old age, including Bellini, Michelangelo, Titian, Ingres, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, O’Keeffe, and Bourgeois. (Read more in ARTnews.)

Best Practices for Live Tweeting

I often live tweet the conferences and events I attend. For example, I was involved with the Twitter discussion while at the Linked Ancient World Data Institute, which led to great conversations with people who weren’t able to attend and allowed for continued engagement among the participants. However, there were times when people asked that information not be shared or that links not be posted—and this information was respected. Overall, though, live tweeting was a major boon to the event. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

The Modern Writing-School Paradox: More Students, Fewer Jobs, More Glory

Never before have there been so many teachers telling so many students how to write. However meager the money, teaching is a paying gig and a subsidized education. The students, though, are a mystery. The number of traditional MFA programs, undergraduate writing programs, nontraditional low-residency writing programs, online writing courses, weekend writing workshops, summer writing conferences, writers’ colony retreats, private-instruction classes, and how-to-write books, blogs, and software programs has grown so colossally you’d think there is as much demand for new writers in the marketplace as there is for mobile-app designers. You’d be wrong. (Read more in the Atlantic.)

A Pollock Restored, a Mystery Revealed

Jackson Pollock’s process and his canvases have been so extensively studied that it would seem there could be nothing else to learn. Yet a ten-month examination and restoration of his One: Number 31, 1950, by conservators at the Museum of Modern Art, have produced new insights about how the artist worked. (Read more in the New York Times.)

Art Detective Warns of Missing Checks That Let Stolen Works Go Undiscovered

European auction houses, dealers, and collectors are failing to make adequate checks to avoid handling stolen artworks, an art lawyer has warned after recovering from an Italian auction an old-master painting taken from its British owner in a burglary more than thirty years ago. Christopher A. Marinello, who specializes in recovering stolen art and resolving title disputes, said: “We do find a lot of stolen and looted artwork in civil-law countries such as Italy, France, and Germany. Consigners of tainted works of art often try to hide behind the good-faith purchase laws of these countries while performing little or no due diligence.” (Read more in the Guardian.)

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’s Art Collection Could Face Sell-Off to Satisfy Detroit’s Creditors

The once unthinkable is suddenly thinkable. Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is considering whether the multibillion-dollar collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts should be considered city assets that potentially could be sold to cover about $15 billion in debt. How much is the art at the DIA worth? Nobody knows exactly, but several billion dollars might well be a low estimate. (Read more in the Detroit Free Press.)

AAMD Statement on Detroit Institute of Arts Collection

A museum’s collection is held in public trust for current and future generations. This is a bedrock principle of the Association of Art Museum Directors and of the museum field as a whole. Art collections are vitally important cultural and educational resources that should never be treated as disposable assets to be liquidated, even in times of economic distress. (Read more from the Association of Art Museum Directors.)

Painting via “Power of Thought” May Hold Some Promise

An Austrian-based company called G-Tech Medical Engineering has developed software that allows people to “paint” on a computer through the “power of thought,” reports the Telegraph science correspondent Richard Gray. As Gray notes, the tool—which researchers are hoping to develop to the point that it can be a chip implanted in the brain—can help patients with progressive brain diseases. But there’s an aspect to art making that may be lost in translation. (Read more in the Houston Chronicle.)

Your Thievin’ Art? At Play in the Field of Fair Use

Julie Saul recently opened a show of work by Arne Svenson, an artist with a telephoto lens, a formalist’s eye, and a somewhat unsettling obsession with his neighbors in the glass-walled apartment building across the street. You can meet them, too, in the color pictures in The Neighbors. Assuming that they really are neighbors—and not conjured in the studio or on the computer—the work falls into one of those gray areas of fair use, the legal doctrine that allows artists to use images of or by others under certain circumstances. (Read more in ARTnews.)

Masterworks for One and All

Many museums post their collections online, but the Rijksmuseum has taken the unusual step of offering downloads of high-resolution images at no cost, encouraging the public to copy and transform its artworks into stationery, t-shirts, tattoos, plates, or even toilet paper. The museum, whose collection includes masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Mondrian, and van Gogh, has already made images of 125,000 of its works available through Rijksstudio, an interactive section of its website. The goal is to add 40,000 images a year until the entire collection of one million artworks spanning eight centuries is available. (Read more in the New York Times.)

Thousands of Cave Paintings Have Been Discovered in Mexico

Archaeologists have uncovered nearly five thousand cave paintings at eleven different sites in Mexico, the likely product of early hunter-gatherers. What’s even more remarkable is that the area was previously thought to be uninhabited. The discovery was made in the northeastern region of Burgos in the San Carlos mountain range of Tamaulipas. The archaeologist Martha García Sánchez, who works at the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History, recently presented these findings at the Historic Archaeology meeting held in Mexico’s National History Museum. (Read more from io9 and BBC News).

Help Desk: Death and Taxes (Mostly Taxes)

I have recently been the lucky recipient of an unprecedented amount of small, but not insubstantial, payments. Some are for arts writing and editing, others are one-time grants, art sales, and various art-world-related odd jobs. All earnings have been issued through W-9s and will show up as 1099-MISC income. None of it has been taxed. I understand that I should set aside a portion of these funds for the state and feds, but where do I start? (Read more in Daily Serving.)

Rejection and Its Discontents

The probability that a researcher will have a grant proposal rejected nowadays is about 1. In the current climate, in which grant agencies and foundations are receiving more proposals than ever before even as their budgets stagnate or shrink, the last few remaining decimal places of uncertainty are rapidly disappearing. It is natural to feel disappointed, angry, hurt, and frustrated when a rejection notice arrives, and it’s OK to give in to those feelings—in private, anyway. (Read more in 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.

What’s the Point of Art School?

As changes to the school curriculum and university funding undermine the arts education system, industry experts gathered at Central Saint Martin’s art school to discuss what the future holds for the field. Are you studying creative arts or design? Share an image or video that captures why you love art school. (Read more in the Guardian.)

It’s Time to Rethink and Expand Art History for the Digital Age

Continuing a conversation on Getty Voices about rethinking art history, the art historian Nuria Rodríguez Ortega, a recent participant in the Digital Art History Lab, argues that we must reestablish digital art history on a new ground, both adapting the field to the new web landscape and broadening its scope to include the full spectrum of human attempts to make meaning of art. (Read more in the Getty Iris.)

To Profit or Not? How Art Galleries Make Money in Chicago, and Why Some Choose Not To

More than once I have heard a Chicago art dealer joke that their commercial gallery is really a not-for-profit because, well, their business makes no profit. Despite that appraisal, nonprofit fundraising techniques are finding their way into the business models of some for-profit startups. Traditionally, commercial galleries have been run as shops that sell products with negotiable price tags. Now, some are experimenting with fundraising and sponsorships as strategies for growth. Oppositely, a couple of nonprofit art organizations are incorporating commercial aspects into their practices, such as selling art and organizing an art fair. (Read more in the New City.)

Andy Warhol and His Foundation: The Questions

After Andy Warhol died in 1987, his will directed that a foundation should be set up in his name, funded with proceeds from the sale of some 95,000 pictures, prints, sculptures, drawings, and photographs left in his estate. As well as creating and endowing the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts provides financial support to artists and scholars, galleries, publications, and educational projects. Warhol’s bequest made no provision for the authentication of his artwork. But in 1994 the foundation initiated work on a multivolume catalogue raisonné of Warhol’s art, in part because the project would “contribute to the stabilization of the market for Warhol works over time, thus having a direct benefit to the Foundation’s longterm goal of converting its Warhol works to cash at favorable prices.” (Read more in the New York Review of Books.)

The New Rules of Engagement

Predictably, the recession uncovered fundamental operational and structural weaknesses in American higher education. Few institutions managed to be as nimble as they should have been in responding to the depressed economy. Even fewer presidents had the courage to call on their boards of trustees to think strategically, make bold plans, innovate, and invest. The harsh truth is that the culture into which “change” presidents are placed commonly accepts limited programmatic innovation, except when it emerges from the faculty, and is intolerant of structural innovation. The culprits are not usually the faculty. (Read more in Academe.)

The Neoliberal Assault on Academia

Lost amid the fetishization of information technology and the pathos of the struggle over proper working conditions for adjunct faculty is the deeper crisis of the academic profession occasioned by neoliberalism. This crisis is connected to the economics of higher education but it is not primarily about that. The neoliberal sacking of the universities runs much deeper than tuition fee hikes and budget cuts. (Read more in Al Jazeera.)

Career Services Must Die

Well, not die, exactly. Transform. “The term ‘career services’ has been a phrase that has been used for several decades to describe what colleges have been doing,” says Andy Chan, vice president for personal and career development at Wake Forest University. “It’s not working.” Chan coedited the new report, A Roadmap for Transforming the College-to-Career Experience. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

The Library’s Future Is Not an Open Book

Talk about imposing: the ceremonial stone stair leading to bronze gates and carved doors; the frieze of inspiring names; and the vaulted hall that seems the very definition of hallowed. And the books, bound portals opening to anywhere imaginable, available to all comers. In cities across the United States, the central public library came into being when the country was young and striving to impress. Architecturally grand, the central library was both beacon and monumental tribute to learning and civic pride; a people’s palace with knowledge freely available to all. But, really, when was the last time you spent any time there? (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)

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.

Cultivating Partnerships in the Digital Humanities

As academics we can be too snug in our institutional silos. We sometimes think of one another as competitors for students, and as a result we duplicate scarce resources in mutually damaging ways. Without more coordinated programs, will we go on teaching the way we have since the Industrial Revolution? Will our students, knowing it doesn’t have to be that way and worried about their future, lose patience with us? The digital humanities provide a context for facing those questions head-on. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

What We’re Not Arguing About

The solutions to the crisis in higher education are still a subject of fierce debate, and I’m happy to see people from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds adding their voices to the conversation. At the same time, I think it’s important to clarify what academics and former academics are and aren’t arguing about. (Read more at Adventures in (Post) Gradland.)

How Long Is the Average Dissertation?

The best part about writing a dissertation is finding clever ways to procrastinate. The motivation for this blog comes from one of the more creative ways I’ve found to keep myself from writing. I’ve posted about data mining in the past, and this post follows up on those ideas using a topic that is relevant to anyone that has ever considered getting, or has successfully completed, their PhD. (Read more at R Is My Friend.)

To Raze or Not? MoMA Rethinks Plan

After impassioned protests from prominent architects, preservationists, and design critics, the Museum of Modern Art said that it would reconsider its decision to demolish its next-door neighbor, the former home of the American Folk Art Museum, to make room for an expansion. In a recent board meeting, the directors were told that a board committee had selected the design firm Diller Scofidio & Renfro to handle the expansion and to help determine whether to keep any of the existing structure. (Read more in the New York Times.)

Help Desk: Ideal Representation

I’ve been meeting with a commercial gallery in my city for some time, and they’ve extended me an offer to come aboard. I’m excited about the idea of professional representation, having a platform to promote myself to a larger audience and further opportunity for sale of work. Some of the work the gallery represents is totally not my style, which is to say, artwork that favors more commercially viable subject matter or style at the cost of exercising any real dynamic or conceptual verve. How much should this influence my decision to join the gallery? (Read more in Daily Serving.)

Thinking about Accreditation in a Rapidly Changing World

Enormous change is under way in higher education, driven by a perfect storm of crisis (around cost, access, quality, and funding), technological innovation and what that innovation makes possible, the growing presence and influence of for-profit providers, abuses (of various kinds), opportunity, and workforce-development needs in a global and technological context. Any one of those challenges might fill an agenda for a commissioners’ retreat or a small conference, but accreditors now wrestle with all of these various forces across a broad landscape of change and urgency. (Read more in Educause Review.)

Counting, Not Curtailing, Adjuncts’ Work

Nowhere does the Law of Unintended Consequences run more rampant than in the field of taxation. That was clearly demonstrated at the Internal Revenue Service’s rule-making hearing on April 23, in the agency’s attempts to craft regulations to impose a steep tax on employers who fail to provide employee health-care coverage required by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. While most of the twenty-five other witnesses at the hearing represented various employers or organizations, I testified in my personal capacity as an interested citizen who happens to be an adjunct faculty member and former IRS lawyer. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

How Prevalent Is Money Laundering in the Art World?

Recent federal charges against the New York dealer Helly Nahmad included that he worked “to launder tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the illegal gambling business.” While Nahmad has pleaded not guilty to all the charges in the indictment, the accusation raises the questions of whether (and if so why) art would be used in this way. Art lends itself to money laundering because the market’s lack of transparency means art can become what Judge Fausto Martin De Sanctiscalls an “invisible asset.” Values can be manipulated, and complex ownership schemes, with an emphasis on secrecy, are commonplace. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

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.

Long Hidden, Vatican Painting Linked to Native Americans

For close to four hundred years, the painting was closed off to the world. For the past 124 years, millions of visitors walked by without noticing an intriguing scene covered with centuries of grime. Only now, the Vatican says a detail in a newly cleaned fifteenth-century fresco shows what may be one of the first European depictions of Native Americans. The fresco, The Resurrection, was painted by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio in 1494—just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in what came to be called the New World. (Read more from National Public Radio.)

Ten Tips to Earn Tenure

I had complained to my colleague that after the intellectually, emotionally, and physically grueling experience of completing graduate school while teaching full-time, I would really look forward to “just” being a professor. She replied, “I hate to tell you this, but you’ll still be working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks to earn tenure and promotion because you’ll have all kinds of other responsibilities besides teaching that you don’t have now.” Over twelve years, three moves, and two blood pressure medicines later, I see how right she was that day. Here are my ten tips for earning tenure and promotion without becoming the nutty professor. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

As Works Flood In, Nation’s Library Treads Water

The Sea Creatures, who recently sent their recording Naked in the Rain to the Library of Congress, probably did not ponder the impact of sequestration on their music’s journey from dream to copyright. Just as military contractors, air-traffic controllers, and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works to the collection, preservation, and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps, and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission. (Read more in the New York Times.)

Q&A with Denise Scott Brown

Denise Scott Brown, the cofounder of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (now VSBA), talks to Architect about a petition to put her name on the 1991 Pritzer Architecture Prize, about her career in design. and about the ways she has been treated as a woman architect in a profession that she has described as a “nineteenth-century upper-middle-class men’s club.” (Read more in Architect.)

Smithsonian Sequestration Closures Could Get Worse

The Smithsonian Institution has announced that parts of three museums—the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of African Art, and the Smithsonian Castle—will close through September 30 because of mandatory budget cuts, but the true effect of sequestration on the museum group is far wider. A Smithsonian spokeswoman says that in addition to these closures, sections of other museums will go dark this year as exhibitions come to their scheduled ends. (Read more in the DCist.)

English Teachers Reject Use of Robots to Grade Student Writing

Critics of standardized tests argue that the written portion of those assessments can short-circuit the process of developing ideas in writing. Using machines to grade those tests further magnifies their negative effects, according to a statement adopted last month by the National Council of Teachers of English. As high-school students prepare for college, the statement reads, they “are ill served when their writing experience has been dictated by tests that ignore the evermore complex and varied types and uses of writing found in higher education.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)