CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 20, 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.
Biotechnology as Art Form
It’s natural that some artists spend as much time in the lab as they do in the studio. Over the last three decades, in fact, artists have cultivated human tissue, bred frogs, assembled DNA profiles, and used modified bacteria as electrical transmitters. Bio-art—as this type of work is called—has also begun to surface in museums and avant-garde art festivals, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth in Australia. (Read more in ARTnews.)
What Do University Presses Do?
A book published by the University of Minnesota Press, begun as the author’s dissertation, had been discussed in the New Yorker. This journey, from dissertation to published book and beyond, provides a counter narrative to the rhetoric about scholarly publishers these days, rhetoric which paints us as parasites sucking profit and capital out of the work of scholars, structured around a “conflict” between publishers, libraries, and scholars often oversimplified into a binary. Publishers are interested in profit. Libraries and scholars are not. (Read more in the University of Minnesota Press Blog.)
What Do Cats Have to Do with It? Welcome to LACMA’s New Collections Website
Two years ago, we launched an experiment: an online image library where we made 2,000 high-resolution images of artworks that the museum deemed to be in the public domain available for download without any restrictions. This week, we’ve exceeded ourselves with the launch of our new collections website, giving away ten times the number of images we offered in the initial image library. Nearly 20,000 high-quality images of art from our collection are available to download and use as you see fit (that’s about a quarter of all the art represented on the site). (Read more in Unframed.)
What to Do with Artist’s Work after Death Can Be Vexing
Since the Oakland artist Thomas “Glen” Whittaker died last month, his longtime companion, Marcy Pitts, has faced the daunting task of deciding what to do with about thirty-five paintings and other works he left behind. More specifically, she has wrestled with how to catalog, value, transport, store, and market the works, some of which are several feet wide. At the forefront of Pitts’s mind is a desire to earn Whittaker, who was 62, recognition for his work. (Read more in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
Pre-Tenure Leadership
As the dean of a college whose faculty includes many assistant professors, I am frequently asked for advice on how much service they should undertake. The twin horns of their dilemma? They know that service counts for less than teaching or research in annual and promotion evaluations … but they also know that demonstrating leadership potential through community engagement is important. (Read more in Inside Higher Ed.)
Things I Didn’t Learn in Graduate School
For more than thirty years now, I have benefited in my professional practice in student affairs from having attended some terrific graduate programs. It’s important to say that explicitly, upfront, as I’m about to focus on the things I didn’t learn in graduate school. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Help Desk: Lazy Art Critic
An art critic who writes for local newspaper recently approached me to review a recent show I installed at a local gallery. He is essentially asking me to provide him with my thoughts on my work and, after reading several of his articles, it seems as if he will just quote me at length rather than provide an actual review of my work. Should I indulge him in my eagerness to gain press attention or decline in hopes of a future proposal from a more attentive critic? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art
Since the early days of modernism, artists have faced a peculiar dilemma with regard to the economy surrounding their work. By breaking from older artistic formations such as medieval artisan guilds, bohemian artists of the nineteenth century distanced themselves from the vulgar sphere of day-to-day commerce in favor of an idealized conception of art and authorship. While on the one hand this allowed for a certain rejection of normative bourgeois life, it also required that artists entrust their livelihoods to middlemen—to private agents or state organizations. While a concern with labor and fair compensation in the arts, exemplified by such recent initiatives as W.A.G.E. or earlier efforts such as the Art Workers Coalition, has been an important part of artistic discourse, so far it has focused primarily on public critique as a means to shame and reform institutions into developing a more fair system of compensation for “content providers.” It seems to me that we need to move beyond the critique of art institutions if we want to improve the relationship between artists and the economy surrounding their work. (Read more in e-flux Journal.)
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — March 20, 2013
In its regular roundup of obituaries, CAA recognizes the lives and achievements of the following artists, scholars, architects, photographers, and others whose work has significantly influenced the visual arts. The beginning of 2013 was marked by the loss of the artist Richard Artschwager and the critics Ada Louise Huxtable and Thomas McEvilley. Two longtime CAA members, Paul B. Arnold and Carl N. Schmalz Jr., also died recently.
- Paul B. Arnold, emeritus professor of fine arts at Oberlin College, died on July 2, 2012, at the age of 93. A CAA member since 1945 and president of the Board of Directors from 1986 to 1988, Arnold was an artist who began his career working in watercolor but later focused on printmaking
- Richard Artschwager, an American painter and sculptor who emerged during the Pop era but whose work embraced diverse media, passed away on February 9, 2013. He was 89 years old
- Bonni Benrubi, a photography dealer based in New York, died on November 29, 2012, at the age of 59. She was among the first gallery owners to specialize exclusively in modern and contemporary photography
- Daniel Blue, a Chicago-based sculptor who worked in metal, was found dead on January 2, 2013. He was 55 years old
- Simon Cerigo, an art dealer, curator, collector, and avid attendee of gallery openings in New York, died on January 20, 2013, at age 60. He operated an eponymous gallery in the East Village from 1985 to 1987
- Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy, a Nigerian painter and illustrator based in the United Kingdom, passed away on December 17, 2012. She was 60 years old
- Thomas Cornell, an artist and longtime professor at Bowdoin College in Maine, died on December 7, 2012, at the age of 75. He helped to establish the Visual Arts Department at his school in 1962
- Burhan Doğançay, a Turkish artist who had lived in New York since the 1960s, died on January 16, 2013, at age 83. The Istanbul Modern Art Museum held a large survey of his abstract works of urban walls last year
- Tejas Englesmith, a former assistant director for Whitechapel Gallery in London during the 1960s who later settled in Houston, died on February 7, 2013. He was 71. Englesmith also served as a curator for the Jewish Museum and director of the Leo Castelli Gallery
- Leonard Flomenhaft, a lawyer and stockbroker who opened Flomenhaft Gallery in New York with his wife Eleanor, passed away on February 8, 2013. He was 90 years old
- Antonio Frasconi, a master woodcut artist from Uruguay who settled in Norwalk, Connecticut, died on January 8, 2013, at age 93
- Clarke Henderson Garnsey, professor emeritus of art history and former chair of the Department of Art at the University of Texas at El Paso, died on March 10, 2012. He was 98
- Raukura “Ralph” Hotere, a leading abstract artist from New Zealand who showed his work internationally, died on February 24, 2013, at the age of 81
- Ada Louise Huxtable, a celebrated architectural critic for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, died on January 7, 2013, at age 91. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for her writing
- George Kokines, an abstract artist based in Chicago, died on November 26, 2012. He was 82. Kokines had taught at several schools, including Northwestern University
- Balthazar Korab, a leading architectural photographer who captured buildings by Eero Saarinen on film, died on January 15, 2013. He was 86 years old
- Udo Kultermann, an internationally recognized scholar who taught for nearly thirty years at Washington University in Saint Louis, passed away on February 9, 2013. He was 85. CAA has published a special obituary on Kultermann
- Farideh Lashai, an Iranian artist known for her lyrical abstract painting and multimedia installations, died on February 24, 2013, at age 68. She helped found and was a member of the Neda Group, a collective of twelve female Iranian artists, in the late 1990s
- Alden Mason, a painter who lived and worked in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, died on February 6, 2013. He was 93 years old
- Thomas McEvilley, a poet, scholar, and art critic based in New York, died on March 2, 2013. He was 73. Among his numerous books are Art and Otherness: Crisis in Cultural Identity (1992), Sculpture in the Age of Doubt (1999), and The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (2002)
- Melanie Michailidis, a postdoctoral fellow in art history and archaeology at Washington University in Saint Louis, died on February 1, 2013. She was 46 years old
- Carl N. Schmalz Jr., an artist and art historian who taught for decades at Bowdoin College and Amherst College, died on February 22, 2013, at age 86. CAA has published a special obituary on Schmalz, who had been a CAA member since 1951
- William F. Stern, a Houston architect who was a principal at Stern and Bucek Architects, died on March 1, 2013, at the age of 66. He also served as an adjunct associate professor of architectural history at the University of Houston
- Michelle Walker, a former dancer and a Californian arts administrator, was found dead on January 29, 2013, at age 53. She had served as director of the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission from 1992 to 2006
- Casey Williams, a Houston photographer known for his “found abstractions,” passed away on January 1, 2013. He was 65
- Bernard A. Zuckerman, an Atlanta businessman and philanthropist, died on February 22, 2013, at age 91. Kennesaw State University is scheduled to open the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art in September of this year
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 — March 13, 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.
NHA Annual Meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day
The National Humanities Alliance will hold its 2013 annual meeting on Monday, March 18, and Humanities Advocacy Day on Tuesday, March 19, both in Washington, DC. Premeeting sessions are tentatively scheduled to begin on Sunday afternoon, March 17. Events will take place on the George Washington University campus and Capitol Hill. (Read more from the National Humanities Alliance.)
Average Pay Increases for Professors on Tenure-Track Matched Inflation This Year
The median base salary for tenured and tenure-track faculty members increased this academic year by an average of 2.1 percent, matching the rate of inflation. That year-to-year increase was slightly higher than the growth last year, when the average increase was 1.9 percent, according to an annual report released by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
LACMA Moves to Take Over MOCA
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has made a formal proposal to acquire the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which has been struggling with financial troubles and staff and board defections. LACMA Director Michael Govan and the two cochairs of his board made the offer in a February 24 letter to the MOCA board cochairs, laying out the rationale for an acquisition. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
Art Emerges from DNA Left Behind
They are the faces of real people, portraitlike sculptures etched from an almost powdery substance. The eye colors are distinct, the facial contours sharp, even though the artist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, has never met or seen her subjects. Instead of using photographs or an art model for her work, she scoops detritus from New York City’s streets—cigarette butts, hair follicles, gum wrappers—and analyzes the genetic material people leave behind. Dewey-Hagborg, a PhD student in electronic arts, makes the faces after studying clues found in DNA. (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)
Can We Please Stop Drawing Trees on Top of Skyscrapers?
Just a couple of years ago, if you wanted to make something look trendier, you put a bird on it. Birds were everywhere. I’m not sure if Twitter was what started all the flutter, but it got so bad that Portlandia performed a skit named, you guessed it, “Put a Bird on It.” It turns out architects have been doing the same thing, just with trees. Want to make a skyscraper look trendy and sustainable? Put a tree on it. Or better yet, dozens. (Read more in Slate.)
Anthony Van Dyck Painting “Found Online”
A previously unknown painting by the seventeenth-century master Anthony Van Dyck has been identified after being spotted online. The portrait was previously thought to have been a copy and was in storage at the Bowes Museum in County Durham. But it was photographed for a project to put all of the United Kingdom’s oil paintings on the BBC Your Paintings website, where it was seen by an art historian. (Read more at BBC News.)
Can Art Forgers Be Artists Too?
Art forgeries are often decried for crime, but could they be considered art? Many young artists learn to copy the old masters before refining their own work, and contemporary artists often play with ideas of authorship. So can an art forger be considered a legitimate artist? Do they want to make a statement? What motivates art forgers to commit forgery? We spoke with Jonathon Keats, author of Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age. (Read more in the Oxford University Press Blog.)
The End of the Creative Classes in Sight
To put it bluntly, it seems that high-skill occupations can be mechanized and outsourced in much the same way as car manufacturing and personal finance. In recent decades, we have become accustomed to the notion that manual labor has been rendered obsolete, uncompetitive, or poorly paid. But are we now prepared for the same thing to happen to skilled labor, to white-collar workers, to the creative classes? (Read more in the Guardian.)
Recent Art Journal Features Lygia Pape Cover
posted by Christopher Howard — March 11, 2013
The most recent issue of Art Journal features an unusual wraparound cover. The front-and-back image is an interior spread from The Book of Creation Re-Created, a 1983 artist’s book by the influential Brazilian artist Lygia Pape (1927–2004). The spread, from an essay on Pape by Adele Nelson, is essentially turned inside out for the cover.
The cover encloses a remarkably diverse issue, which also features essays by Chris Balaschak on the photographer Garry Winogrand, by Pamela N. Corey on the the Vietnamese American artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen, by Bill Anthes on Edgar Heap of Birds, by Melissa Sue Ragain on early ecological art, and by Adward A. Vazquez on the work of Fred Sandback. Reviews of four important books in the arts, including one on Agnes Martin, appear as well. The Art Journal website features free selected content from the issue.
March 2013 Picks from CAA’s Committee on Women in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — March 07, 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 March 2013 are composed of three important exhibitions on the East Coast of the United States. Organized by Dena Muller, Jay Defeo: A Retrospective will be on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York through June 2, after its celebrated first presentation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California in 2012–13. Also in New York, the Bronx Museum of the Arts is presenting paintings created since 2001 by Joan Semmel. Finally, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and University of the Arts in Philadelphia are hosting Lenore Tawney: Wholly Unlooked For, a multivenue exhibition of work by this pioneering fiber artist.
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: Jay DeFeo working on what was then titled Deathrose, 1960 (photograph by Burt Glinn and © Burt Glinn/Magnum Photos)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — March 06, 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.
Help Desk: Gallery Contract
I was invited to be in a group show outside my home state. I don’t know the owner (who found my work online), and I’d never heard of the gallery before, but it has a nice website and seems okay. I replied that I was interested and asked the owner for a copy of the contract, and he wrote me back and said he never uses one. I’d like to be in this show because my résumé is a little thin, but I am wary of just sending my work out. What should I do? Do most galleries work like this? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Twelve Bloopers to Avoid in Job Interviews
In the course of my academic career, I’ve been interviewed for junior and senior faculty positions as well as for administrative posts like the provostship I now hold. I have also been on more search committees than I care to count. Over time, I’ve observed (at least) a dozen bloopers to avoid at all costs in job interviews. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Finding the Right Context
Papers and books exist in the context of academic disciplines. As we work on projects, we are in conversation with those who have done similar research in the past. An important part of any writing is acknowledging work that came before it and placing the research in a relevant scholarly context. This serves several purposes, such as letting the reader know in what particular literature one is situating one’s work, clarifying what is motivating one’s specific questions, and also giving credit to others who have done work in the domain. (Read more in Inside Higher Ed.)
Does Increased Exposure to a Piece of Art Make Us Like It More?
The research challenges the idea that what people value in art is largely what they are used to, or that people will come to like any image if they see it enough times. Instead, the study’s findings suggest that increased exposure to artworks does not necessarily make people like them more and that the quality of an artwork remains at the heart of its evaluation. (Read more at Phys.Org.)
Lawyers Go to Cambodia over Statue
Two lawyers from the United States Attorney’s Office in Manhattan recently traveled into the Cambodian jungle to inspect an ancient, crumbling temple as part of their office’s effort to seize a tenth-century Khmer statue that Sotheby’s hopes to sell at auction. The unusual four-day trip is the latest development in a court case involving the auction house and US officials, who are trying to help Cambodia gain possession of the statue, which it contends was looted from the temple during the chaos of that country’s civil war. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Data Indicates Rapid Growth in Mobile Learning
Based on two interesting data sets shared by Apple and Cisco, it’s clear that learning on mobile devices—meaning smartphones and tablets—is gaining traction at a rapid pace. While the data shared by Apple is pretty straightforward and does not leave much room for interpretation, the data from Cisco is more general yet pretty astonishing. (Read more in Edcetera.)
Keeping an Eye on Online Test-Takers
Millions of students worldwide have signed up in the last year for MOOCs, short for massive open online courses—those free, web-based classes available to one and all and taught by professors at Harvard, Duke, MIT, and other universities. But when those students take the final exam in calculus or genetics, how will their professors know that the test-takers on their distant laptops are doing their own work, and not asking Mr. Google for help? (Read more in the New York Times.)
Digital Textbooks: Publishers and the Unrealized Promise
Is it any wonder that digital textbooks haven’t been widely embraced yet? Most digital textbooks are just overpriced, static versions of their printed counterparts. That hasn’t stopped the hype about digital textbooks. On one hand, it’s the promise of a new learning experience, with spinning molecules and interactive modules. On the other, it’s the long-awaited solution to the industry’s painful pricing practices. Maybe even both, if we dare to dream it. (Read more in Publishing Perspectives.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — February 27, 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 Inclusion in Governance of Faculty Members Holding Contingent Appointments
The report that follows was prepared by a joint subcommittee of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee on Contingency and the Profession and the Committee on College and University Governance. Approved by both parent committees, the report was adopted as policy by the AAUP Council at its November 2012 meeting. (Read more from the American Association of University Professors.)
Cooper-Hewitt Announces Publication of White Paper on Socially Responsible Design
The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has announced the publication of a white paper, Design and Social Impact: A Cross-Sectoral Agenda for Design Education, Research, and Practice, along with a panel discussion on the paper’s findings and proposals. The paper is an outgrowth of the 2012 Social Impact Design Summit at the Rockefeller Foundation, which was hosted by Cooper-Hewitt and other groups to discuss strategies and actions to advance the field of socially responsible design—one term that refers to the practice of design for the public good, especially in disadvantaged communities. (Read more from the Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum.)
The Art of Technology
John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, remembers the night his Japanese-born father attended a parent–teacher conference in Seattle. The teacher gushed, “John excels at both art and math.” Later, he overheard his father proudly tell a customer at his tofu store, “John—he’s good at math.” Four decades later—at a time when economists, corporate executives, and politicians talk about the need for national excellence in science and engineering—Maeda is still trying to ensure that the arts aren’t forgotten. (Read more in the National Journal.)
3D-Printing Pen Turns Doodles into Sculptures
Free yourself from the tyranny of paper and boring 2D. With a $75 pen you can draw in thin air. The 3Doodle pen, developed by start-up company WobbleWorks, works much like a handheld 3D printer. It contains a mains-powered heater that melts the plastic beads used in such printers. (Read more in the New Scientist.)
Art School Panels Highlight Issues in Contemporary Art
On Saturday, the Yale School of Art hosted its first series of panels featuring students, curators, and professional artists discussing issues in contemporary art. The day of panels—which covered everything from the role of the internet in art making to how the camera phone has changed photography—was meant to foster discussion in a public setting about ideas that students had been dealing with in their mandatory first-semester “Critical Practice” class. (Read more in the Yale Daily News.)
The Geography of America’s Freelance Economy
Writing in the Atlantic back in 2011, Sara Horowitz, the founder of Freelancers Union, dubbed the “freelance surge” the “Industrial Revolution of our time”—as significant a shift in employment patterns as has been seen since the transition from agriculture to industry in the 1800s. A recent report estimates that there are about 17 million full-employed freelancers, or independent workers, a number than swells to more than 40 million, roughly a third of the workforce, when you include temps, part-timers, contractors, contingent workers, and those who are underemployed or work without employer-sponsored health insurance, 401Ks, or FLEX accounts. (Read more in the Atlantic.)
What Happened to Arts Students When the Fees Went Up?
When tuition fees tripled last year, with many universities setting their rates at the highest possible amount of £9,000, arts professionals in the country held their breath. Would the introduction of higher fees create a “dearth of training for people who don’t have independent wealth or rich parents,” as actor Clare Higgins put it? The truth is, it’s still hard to pinpoint the impact of last year’s fee rises. (Read more in the Guardian.)
Art Gallery Sued Again over Sale of Paintings
The once esteemed gallery Knoedler & Company has been sued five times since late 2011 by former clients who said it sold them forged paintings procured from a little-known Long Island dealer. Now the shuttered gallery is being sued by an investor who says paintings from the same dealer are genuine and that Knoedler did not do enough to sell them. (Read more in the New York Times.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — February 20, 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.
Move Over Galleries: Artists Sign with Agents
The British artist Stuart Semple has signed a contract for worldwide representation with the fashion agency Next Management, a move that highlights again how the traditional artist–gallery relationship is changing. Several artists, including Damien Hirst and Keith Tyson, have agents or managers who provide financial advice and handle their business dealings with galleries, but Semple says his collaboration will more closely resemble relationships in the music industry, where managers act as a buffer between their acts and the outside world, helping to promote their work and negotiate their projects. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
Help Desk: Art Consultant
I was just approached by an art consultant who asked me “how I normally work with art consultants.” I think what the person wanted to know is how I want to divide sales, like a percentage ratio, and I just don’t know what is normal. I tried to find online standards for art consultant–artist relationships that develop without a gallery being involved, but everything was all over the place and contradictory. (Read more at Daily Serving.)
The Humanities, Unraveled
Let me start with the bad news. It is not even news anymore; it is simply bad. Graduate education in the humanities is in crisis. Every aspect, from the most specific details of the curriculum to the broadest questions about its purpose, is in crisis. It is a seamless garment of crisis: if you pull on any one thread, the entire thing unravels. Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Four Common Misconceptions on Creative Thinking in Research
Research is a creative activity. In essence, to solve your research question, you will need to take a step outside the boundaries of current knowledge. If you are expected to develop a new theory as part of your research, you certainly need to get your creative juices flowing. When we read the work of great scientists, it sometimes seems as if they possess of some extraordinary tweak in their brain that makes them capable of taking a visionary leap and pushing their field to new advances. In reality, however, all creative solutions are simply the result of a long process of trying, researching, and chewing at the end of pencils. Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
Fire at Pratt Institute Destroys Studios and Artwork of Students
Maria De Los Angeles, a twenty-four-year-old student at Pratt Institute, has an admissions interview at Yale University’s graduate art school next month and was planning to show the officers there some of her one hundred paintings and three hundred prints. But in last Friday’s early hours, a fast-moving fire ravaged the top two floors of the historic main building at the private art, design, and architecture college in Brooklyn, destroying dozens of art studios and the precious works they contained. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Will You Lose Your Museum Job to a Robot?
OK, maybe not to a robot, but to increasingly sophisticated automation. This question is prompted by a report released last month by the Associated Press forecasting the effect of technology on the economy and employment. The thesis of the authors is that the world is experiencing the first real “jobless recovery” in history, as we bounce back from the great recession of 2008. They argue that the millions of jobs that went away in the past few years not only are not coming back, even more jobs will be lost as automation takes over more work. (Read more at the Center for the Future of Museums.)
A Critic’s Take on Arts and Entrepreneurship
“Arts entrepreneurship” certainly isn’t an oxymoron, unless your definition of art is so narrow that any business success disqualifies it—the attitude of the stereotypical rock snob for whom the little-heard indie debut is always better than the major-label follow-up. On the other hand, the conflict between art and commerce is age old, and there’s no question pandering to an audience can undermine artistic quality. But there’s no magic formula for striking the balance. (Read more in Audience Wanted.)
Sotheby’s Sued over Caravaggio Attribution
Sotheby’s is being sued for damages over a work it attributed to a “follower” of Caravaggio that sold at auction in London to the late collector and scholar Denis Mahon in 2006, for a hammer price of £42,000. Mahon subsequently identified the painting as a work “by the hand of Caravaggio” and obtained an export license for it that gave an estimated selling price of £10 million, according to a claim filed at London’s High Court of Justice. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
“Publishing The Art Bulletin” Launches
posted by Christopher Howard — February 13, 2013
This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the first issue of The Art Bulletin, CAA’s flagship journal of art-historical scholarship. “Publishing The Art Bulletin: Past, Present, and Future,” an ambitious online project, has just launched to celebrate the occasion. The project employs a deep exploration of the journal’s hundred-year archive to stimulate thinking about the forms that a future Art Bulletin might take.
Three outstanding essays—by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1939), Mehmet Aga-Oglu (1945), and Suzanne Preston Blier (1993)—stand at the heart of the project, which also features an array of features possible only in a digital format. Thelma K. Thomas, an associate professor in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and chair of the Art Bulletin Editorial Board, created the website in collaboration with the Scalar project of the Alliance for the Networking of Visual Culture and the University of Southern California, which helped fund the project.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — February 13, 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.
Interview with NEA Chief of Staff Jamie Bennett
With Rocco Landesman’s announcement to step down from the chairmanship of the NEA, can you reflect on the major accomplishments of his and your tenure and assess the impact—current and future—on the field? What do you see as unfinished business at the agency? (Read more at Barry’s Blog.)
Artists in Egypt Work in a Tense Atmosphere
The Muslim women in Marwa Adel’s photographs are shadows, repressed by custom, religion, marriage, and regret. While nude, the figures are obscured by sepia scrims, scrawled upon with stifling words—as if their true selves may never be known. Like their creator, a single mother edging at the bounds of artistic freedom in a patriarchal society, the images are at once vulnerable and defiant. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
Decompressing Salaries
It’s a dilemma many universities face: how to attract new, top faculty with competitive salaries without being unfair to senior professors, whose salaries often are tied to a pay scale or plan that hasn’t kept up with the outside market. Weighing recruiting needs against a desire to alleviate the morale-busting effect of salary compression on faculty, one Midwest university has launched a series of initiatives to address it. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
In Search of a Good Critique
From the hiring side of the table, we’ve all seen job candidates who seem to be doing well only to fall flat in one venue: they ace the teaching demo and the dinner meeting but stumble during the research talk. Perhaps the candidate was disorganized, too strident, or just long winded and boring. Whatever the cause, the outcome is a strong negative ding when it comes time to vote on the hire. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Less Is More: The Rise of the Very Limited Edition
Good design used to be a simple matter. Was the object easy to use? Simple in appearance? Made from high-quality materials? Value for money? Those were the important questions. But today design is significantly more complex. Before a product ever gets to a consumer, it has usually been subjected to investment analysis, prototype development, focus-group discussion, and advertising campaigns. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
Why It’s Time for Galleries to Dump the Jargon
Do you like nature, and art? If so, you might like something called On Vanishing Land, produced by the British “sound artists and theorists” Mark Fisher and Justin Barton. What they’ve produced, which will be in an art gallery called the Showroom, is “a new form of sonic fiction from the dreamings, gleamings, and prefigurations that pervade the Suffolk coast.” Themes “of incursion” by “unnameable forces, geological sentience, or temporary anomaly” will, apparently, “recur throughout.” (Read more in the Independent.)
Help Desk: A Uniform Presentation
My question concerns the issue of a “signature style” and the importance of projecting an image of consistency, particularly on one’s personal website. I’ve done a lot of different things and tend to work in the medium that I feel best expresses what I am trying to communicate. As a result, I’ve got a real mix of things: photos, text-based pieces, assemblages/sculptures, some video work. While I can personally see the threads of consistency running through the work, I’ve been cautioned that I need to “grow up, pick one thing, and get known for it.” (Read more at Daily Serving.)
The Price of a Bad Review
Librarian questions quality of a publishing house. Librarian publicly criticizes said press on his personal blog. Two years later, librarian and current employer get sued for libel and damages in excess of $4 million. That’s been the progression of events for Dale Askey, associate university librarian at McMaster University in Ontario, where he’s been working since 2011. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)