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.

Cariou v. Prince Decision

We conclude that the district court applied the incorrect standard to determine whether Richard Prince’s artworks make fair use of Patrick Cariou’s copyrighted photographs. We further conclude that all but five of Prince’s works do make fair use of Cariou’s copyrighted photographs. With regard to the remaining five Prince artworks, we remand to the district court to consider, in the first instance, whether Prince is entitled to a fair-use defense. (Read more from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.)

Appropriate Standards in Appropriation Art? Cariou v. Prince Decision Garners Relief but Fails to Provide Substantive Guidance

One of the most closely watched copyright cases in the legal and contemporary-art worlds was settled last week. On Thursday, April 25, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the 2011 District Court decision, holding that the contemporary artist Richard Prince’s appropriation of thirty images from the photographer Patrick Cariou’s book Yes Rasta for his own Canal Zone series was protected under the fair-use doctrine. (Read more from the Center for Art Law.)

Second Circuit Victory for Richard Prince and Appropriation Art

The decision in Cariou v. Prince confirms the principle that a use can be fair even if it doesn’t criticize or comment on the original work. While it’s far from groundbreaking to say that commentary or criticism isn’t necessary for fair use, it is a principle that hasn’t been applied before in the visual-art context. (Read more from the Center for Internet and Society, Stanford Law School.)

Judicial Activism and the Return of Modernism in the Cariou v. Prince Decision

The Cariou v. Prince decision was handed down last Thursday. I have struggled with what to write primarily because I have been shocked into a catatonic state. How two intelligent minds could draft such an epic disaster is beyond any form of comprehension. One would hope that after eleven months of deliberation and critical analysis we would have been given something more than twenty-three pages of judicial poetry. (Read more at Clancco.)

A More Positive Take

You may remember the fantastic piece on art and copyright by the artist and lawyer Alfred Steiner that I linked to couple months ago. I asked him what he thought about the Second Circuit’s decision in Cariou v. Prince, and this is what he had to say. (Read more in the Art Law Blog.)

House Judiciary Chairman to Launch Sweeping Review of US Copyright Law

House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Virginia) said last week that his committee will launch a sweeping review of the country’s copyright law and hold a series of hearings on the matter “in the months ahead.” In remarks at the Library of Congress, Goodlatte argued that existing copyright law lags behind the rapid pace of technology, forcing policymakers to make challenging decisions based on these outdated rules. (Read more in the Hill.)

UK Museums Must Pay for Images Where Copyright Is Unknown

Museums will have to pay upfront for orphan images, or images whose copyright owners cannot be found, after an amendment to the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill to limit proposals was narrowly defeated in the House of Lords. Several members condemned the government’s plans, which require holders of orphan works to pay for copyright licensing on use, rather than when a rights holder steps forward. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing

Today’s public-policy debates frame copyright policy solely as a “trade off” between the benefits of incentivizing new works and the social deadweight losses imposed by the access restrictions imposed by these (temporary) “monopolies.” I recently wrote and published a paper, “How Copyright Drives Innovation in Scholarly Publishing,” explaining that this is a fundamental mistake that has distorted the policy debates about scholarly publishing. (Read more from the Copyright Alliance.)

In Sobel v. Eggleston, Limited Edition Is No Limit to Subsequent Editions

It took less than a year for Judge Deborah A. Batts to rule in Sobel v. Eggleston, dismissing the plaintiff Jonathan Sobel’s claims with prejudice. In summary, Sobel purchased eight of the defendant William Eggleston’s photographs between 2008 and 2011. The plaintiff’s belief that the works were part of limited editions supposedly led him to pay a premium for them. Eggleston, however, created reprints of these images different in size, medium, and production date from the set purchased by the plaintiff. Subsequently, according to Sobel, the monetary value of the original limited edition was “substantially diminished.” (Read more from the Center for Art Law.)

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.

Colleges Are Slashing Adjuncts’ Hours to Skirt New Rules on Health-Insurance Eligibility

Allison G. Armentrout, an adjunct instructor at Stark State College, doesn’t get paid by the hour. She earns $4,600 to teach two English composition courses. But now she carefully tracks how many hours she works on an electronic time sheet. On a recent week, she spent three hours preparing for her lectures, close to six hours in the classroom, and sixteen more grading assignments for a grand total of about twenty-five hours. She came in under the college’s new twenty-nine-hour-a-week wire designed to keep her ineligible for health-care coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Women on the Verge

A lady in a bonnet is shaking up the art world. When After Lunch, Berthe Morisot’s portrait of a doe-eyed woman, sold for $10.9 million in February, it set a record as the most expensive work by a female artist ever sold at auction. It also helped power a wave of interest among collectors and dealers looking to identify undervalued female artists. While an age-old debate rages over whether talent, sexism, or lack of promotion has held many women out of the art world’s boys club, everyone agrees that prices for female artists have always lagged behind those of their male counterparts. (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)

Born Digital: Rhizome’s Heather Corcoran

When Heather Corcoran was appointed executive director of the art and technology nonprofit Rhizome last summer—replacing the long-time director Lauren Cornell, who had resigned in the spring to curate the New Museum’s triennial with Ryan Trecartin—she was an unknown quantity in New York. Nevertheless, her entire career has focused on the overlapping fields of contemporary art and technology (mostly in the United Kingdom), making the twenty-nine-year-old Canadian a good fit for Rhizome. (Read more in Art in America.)

Meet the First Digital Generation. Now Get Ready to Play by Their Rules

Anna Daniszewski, a sophomore at Bard College, takes a dozen or more cell-phone pictures daily, usually around dusk or after dark—moody shots of found objects, bare branches against a gray sky, or lighted windows in the distance, evoking the way sensitive, artistic young men and women have always felt about life. You can totally imagine Goethe doing the same thing, preserving each precious instant of angst for the posterity that would someday recognize his genius. Except Daniszewski doesn’t preserve them all—she is embracing the ephemeral. (Read more in Wired.)

Open Access: Four Ways It Could Enhance Academic Freedom

Are politicians stealing our academic freedom? Is their fetish with open-access publishing leading to a “pay to say” system for the rich? And will the trendy goal of making publicly financed research freely available skew the world of scholarship even further toward the natural sciences? I don’t think so. But it took me a while to get there. (Read more in the Guardian.)

Credit without Teaching

Earlier this year Capella University and the new College for America began enrolling hundreds of students in academic programs without courses, teaching professors, grades, deadlines, or credit-hour requirements, but with a path to genuine college credit. The two institutions are among a growing number that are giving competency-based education a try. Students can earn credit by successfully completing assessments that prove their mastery in predetermined competencies or tasks—maybe writing in a business setting or using a spreadsheet to perform calculations. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

Spirituality and Sprite, Aisle 1? What an Artist Sees in Walmart

Most people would be hard-pressed to call Walmart a source of artistic inspiration. Yet that’s exactly what the artist Brendan O’Connell sees in the sprawling big-box stores. For the past decade, O’Connell has been snapping photographs inside dozens of Walmarts. The images have served as inspiration for an ongoing series of paintings of everyday life—much of which involves shopping, which he calls “that great contemporary pastime.” (Read more from National Public Radio.)

Top 10 Online Colleges Names the “Top 30 Most Beautiful College Art Galleries”

A website dedicated to college rankings, Top 10 Online Colleges, recently named the “30 Most Beautiful College Art Galleries” in the world. The international list is based on qualities such as reputation, location, architecture, history, and artistic culture, making a handy web resource for students to learn more about the role of fine arts in college life. (Read more at BWW Art World.)

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.

Arts and Humanities Endowments Would Edge Up under Obama’s Budget

Federal funds for the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities would remain stable under President Barack Obama’s proposed budget for the 2014 fiscal year. His budget proposal, released last week, would raise each endowment’s budgets by roughly $200,000, to $154.5 million for the coming fiscal year. The two endowments offer grants to colleges for research and fellowships in the arts and humanities, among other activities. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Video of Instructor at USC Sets Off Controversy, but Is Context Missing?

A video of an instructor at the University of Southern California bashing Republicans in class goes viral and is cited as evidence of liberal indoctrination. But critics don’t mention that he was hired as an adjunct instructor for a program that seeks partisans—liberals and conservatives alike. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

How Photographers Joined the Self-Publishing Revolution

Having long since shaken off the kind of stigma that still attaches to, say, self-published fiction, the self-published photobook is currently a mini-phenomenon within the bigger thriving culture of photography book publishing. The wider context for this DIY approach is the availability of relatively cheap digital technology and the attendant rise of social media–led networking, which allows photographers to disseminate, market, and sell their own books without recourse to the traditional artist–publisher relationship. (Read more in the Guardian.)

A Page from Our Handbook: Building Your Internet Presence

Because the internet is contemporary culture’s primary means for communication and information dissemination, having an active online presence is essential for artists. The web continues to rapidly evolve, so what follows are some basic ways to think about building and refining how you represent yourself and your work online. What’s most important is for you to find the best way to communicate the clarity, force, and excellence of your work and put that online. (Read more at Creative Capital.)

Cell Phones in the Classroom: What’s Your Policy

Are we old fuddy-duddies when we ask (demand) students to put away their cell phones in the classroom or clinical areas? Students tell me this is just the way it is now, but I disagree. What is the answer to this problem? Are faculty members being too demanding by placing cell-phone restrictions in syllabi or clinical handbooks? (Read more in Faculty Focus.)

Advocates Say Ethnic Studies Misunderstood, Needlessly under Fire

Ron Scapp, president of the National Association for Ethnic Studies, exited the airplane headed to his annual board meeting last week in Fort Collins, Colorado, ready to galvanize ethnic-studies program chairs from colleges across the country. He said he felt a sense of urgency because there were too many headlines in the news recently that might have detrimental consequences for ethnic-studies programs across the board. (Read more at Diverse Issues in Higher Education.)

Why Not a Two-Tier System?

In recent years, some very smart people—such as Michael Bérubé, Marc Bousquet, Anthony Grafton, and William Pannapacker—have offered their thoughts about how to fix graduate education and, by extension, the academic labor market, which, we all seem to agree, has “unraveled.” I approach this issue from a different perspective: as someone who does not work at a prestigious research university but rather at a two-year teaching college; as someone with several decades of experience on faculty search committees; and as someone who does not hold a PhD but instead something much closer to what Bérubé describes as “a rigorous four-year MA.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Pragmatic Advising

My students, especially soon-to-be master’s-degree recipients, frequently ask about whether PhD programs are a good career path. Given the difficulties of this job market, even for students in a professional program who have experience in the field, the prospect of a PhD can seem like a permanent safe harbor. Appearances deceive, though, as a tight academic job market and a deepening reliance on adjuncts make even employment after the PhD a difficult proposition. It’s no surprise, then, that there’s been an increasingly strident pushback to the idea that PhDs are necessary. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

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.

AAUP Releases 2012–13 Salary Survey

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has released its new salary survey, called Here’s the News: The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2012–13. The AAUP’s annual report is the premier source for data on full-time faculty salaries, and this year’s document also provides updates on pay and working conditions for colleagues in contingent appointments. (Read more from the American Association of University Professors.)

From Math Teacher to Adult Film Extra: The Unexpected Early Jobs of Thirty Art Stars

Everyone started out somewhere—including your favorite art stars. Some of the biggest names in the visual arts came from surprisingly humble beginnings, and we’ve picked out thirty of the most telling examples of artists who had less-than-glamorous jobs while pursuing their craft. Sometimes, this exercise actually yields serious insight into the styles they became known for, sometimes not. In every case, though, it gives a window into the life behind the work. (Read more at Blouin Artinfo.)

The National Digital Public Library Is Launched

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), to be launched on April 18, is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge. How is that possible? In order to answer that question, I would like to describe the first steps and immediate future of the DPLA. But before going into detail, I think it important to stand back and take a broad view of how such an ambitious undertaking fits into the development of what we commonly call an information society. (Read more in the New York Review of Books.)

Scholars Increasingly Use Online Resources, Survey Finds, but They Value Traditional Formats Too

Scholars continue to get more comfortable with electronic-only journals, and they increasingly get access to the material they want via digital channels, including internet search engines and more-specific discovery tools provided by academic libraries. When it comes time to publish their own research, though, faculty members still seek out journals with the highest prestige and the widest readership in their fields, whether or not those journals are electronic and make articles free online. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too)

The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects. But they found out the hard way that they were wrong. The prestigious, academically sanctioned conference they had in mind has a slightly different name: Entomology 2013 (without the hyphen). The one they had signed up for featured speakers who were recruited by email, not vetted by leading academics. Those who agreed to appear were later charged a hefty fee for the privilege, and pretty much anyone who paid got a spot on the podium that could be used to pad a résumé. (Read more in the New York Times.)

To Salvage and Sell?

After Superstorm Sandy hit New York City last October, the conservator Gloria Velandia’s studio was littered with hundreds of damaged works of art. But whether she repaired a work depended not so much on the extent of the damage, but on whether or not she received approval to proceed from the insurance company paying the bill. “It’s a decision made by the insurance adjusters,” Velandia says, and they might decide it’s cheaper instead to declare a work “a total loss” and pay out its insured value. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

How Many Light Bulbs Does It Take to Discolor a van Gogh?

Last year, conservators at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam noticed that areas of bright yellow paint in many of the artist’s works, such as Sunflowers, were turning shades of green and brown. To find out why, they teamed up with scientists at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Online news reports claimed that the scientists found prolonged exposure to LED lights to be the cause of the darkening. That conclusion, however, is inaccurate. (Read more in ARTnews.)

Fighting the Fear

Seeking to rouse their colleges to stand up against inadequate compensation and working conditions, adjunct instructors and labor activists at the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers conference collided with the concern that speaking out could be worse than keeping quiet. But in searching for solutions that would inspire instructors off the tenure track to overcome that fear, speakers at the conference cast about for cultural and historical analogies without seeming to settle on a specific one. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

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.

ARTstor to Help Launch the Digital Public Library of America

ARTstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America to provide access to more than ten thousand high-quality images from six leading museums. In addition to linking to the original contributing museum’s own website, each DPLA record will link to the image in Open ARTstor, a new ARTstor initiative that allows users to view and download large versions of public-domain images. (Read more from the Digital Public Library of America.)

The Etiquette of Accepting a Job Offer

The academic job market is overcrowded, but departments are hiring, and each year thousands of graduate students and other candidates will get phone calls offering them tenure-track positions. It is typically a moment of mutual giddiness. The department heads are excited at the prospect of a terrific new colleague; the job applicants now know that their immediate future is assured. Then, well, complications may ensue. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Help Desk: Juried Shows

I am a painter who recently graduated from art school but haven’t had much gallery experience, and I was interested in submitting work to some juried shows as a way of gaining some experience and making some new connections. Could you offer some advice on finding reputable juried shows to apply to? (Read more at Daily Serving.)

Having “The Talk”

Anyone considering joining the alt-ac job market will eventually tell his or her academic colleagues that he or she might be jumping off the tenure-track train. For graduate students this will often mean having “the talk” with their advisers. There are several reasons why it is important to seek your adviser’s support, even for an alt-ac career. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)

How Can We Reimagine Arts Schools?

Perhaps what was most thrilling and unexpected about the meeting of 250 arts leaders at the “3 Million Stories” conference was an emerging sense of urgency and excitement about the need to think seriously about how arts schools and training institutions—especially at the collegiate level—might reimagine themselves and respond to changes in how creative work is done and the nature of creative careers. In short, who will invent the twenty-first-century arts school? (Read more at Barry’s Blog.)

STEM and Liberal Arts: Frenemies of the State

When I was getting ready for college, I knew I was going to pursue a degree in some area of science; I never even considered a liberal-arts degree. To be honest, I did my best to not take any liberal-arts courses I didn’t need to. These classes were at odds with my science, and I didn’t want to waste my time on something I wasn’t going to use. (Read more at Plos.)

Sotheby’s Controversial Sale of Precolumbian Artifacts Yields Low Sales Figures and Highlights the Increased Efforts of Countries to Repatriate Artifacts

Last week’s sale of Precolumbian artifacts predominantly from the Barbier-Mueller collection, conducted at Sotheby’s in Paris, proved an anticlimactic end to a controversial story. Though estimated to bring in $19 to 23 million, the sale only made $13.3 million, and 165 of the 313 lots were unsold. An unwelcome spotlight had been fixed on the sale, as four countries—Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Costa Rica—demanded return of artifacts that were allegedly stolen from their borders decades before. (Read more at the Center for Art Law.)

Managing Your Online Time

Over the course of a teaching day, most faculty members find themselves on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, Blackboard (or its competitors), blogs, and email. We manage a steady stream of online demands. Yet one of the most frequent complaints from students is that their instructors have “no online presence.” (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.

Outside the Citadel, Social Practice Art Is Intended to Nurture

In Detroit a contemporary-art museum is completing a monument to an influential artist that will not feature his work but will instead provide food, haircuts, education programs, and other social services to the general public. In New York an art organization that commissions public installations has been dispatching a journalist to politically precarious places around the world where she enlists artists and activists—often one and the same—to write for a website that can read more like a policy journal than an art portal. And in St. Louis an art institution known primarily for its monumental Richard Serra sculpture is turning itself into a hub of social activism. If none of these projects sounds much like art, that is precisely the point. (Read more in the New York Times.)

The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio

J. Paul Robinson, chairman of the Purdue University faculty senate, walks the halls of a ten-story tower, pointing out a row of offices for administrators. “I have no idea what these people do,” says the biomedical engineering professor. Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000-a-year chief diversity officer. Among its sixteen deans and eleven vice presidents are a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief. The average full professor at the public university in West Lafayette, Indiana, makes $125,000. The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. (Read more in Business Week.)

Let’s Do Lunch

In master’s programs, and especially at the doctoral level, graduate students depend on their advisers more than on anyone else in their careers. Students do more work for their adviser’s eyes than for anyone else’s, and the adviser’s approval is the key to the door that leads to the next place, whether full-time employment or more school. So an adviser’s criticism of a graduate student’s work can pierce deeper than the tiny hooks on a burr. And the adviser may not know it. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

The Gallery’s Glass Ceiling: Sexism Persists in the German Art World

The art world is typically seen as open and progressive, even radical. But artists and curators in Germany say that, despite slow progress, the art scene is still plagued by widespread sexism and a conservative, macho culture. (Read more in Spiegel Online.)

The Chapman Brothers on Life as Artists’ Assistants

“It was hard labor by any measure,” says Jake Chapman, recalling his and brother Dinos’s apprenticeship as assistants to Gilbert and George. “There was absolutely no creative input at all. They were very polite and it was interesting to hear them talking—as we did our daily penance.” What did the work involve? “Coloring in their prints. We colored in Gilbert and George’s penises for eight hours a day.” (Read more in the Guardian.)

Protect Rights of Artists in New Copyright Law

The head of the US Copyright Office has suggested that it may be time to start considering “the next great Copyright Act.” The last general revision to US copyright law passed in 1976 at the end of a process that took over twenty years. Since then, incredible technological advances have brought new opportunities and challenges to which copyright law has not been immune. In fact, with the advent of digital platforms and the internet, the centuries-old legal doctrine of copyright has perhaps faced more challenges than any other area of the law. (Read more in the Hill.)

Can Unions Save the Creative Class?

They’re just for hard hats. They peaked around the time Elvis was getting big. They killed Detroit. They’ve got nothing to do with you or me. They’re a special interest—and they hate our freedom. That’s the kind of noise you pick up in twenty-first-century America—in politics and popular culture alike—when you tune your station to the issue of trade unions. (Read more in Salon.)

Tackling Concerns of Independent Workers

Soon after landing a job at a Manhattan law firm nearly twenty years ago, Sara Horowitz was shocked to discover that it planned to treat her not as an employee, but as an independent contractor. Her status meant no health coverage, no pension plan, no paid vacation—nothing but a paycheck. She realized that she was part of a trend in which American employers relied increasingly on independent contractors, temporary workers, contract employees, and freelancers to cut costs. (Read more in the New York Times.)