CAA News Today
Recent Deaths in the Arts
posted by Christopher Howard — December 19, 2012
In its monthly 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 end of 2012 was marked by the loss of the painter Will Barnet, the architect Oscar Niemeyer, and the museum director Gudmund Vigtel.
- Evelyn Ackerman, a Californian artist and designer who worked in mosaics, tapestries, and wood carving, died on November 28, 2012, at age 88. She often collaborated with her husband, the artist Jerome Ackerman; their work was recognized in a retrospective exhibition, Masters of Mid-Century California Modernism, at the Mingei International Museum in San Diego
- Gae Aulenti, the Italian architect and designer who transformed a Paris train station into the Musée d’Orsay, died on October 31, 2012. She was 84. Aulenti also worked on renovations to museums in Barcelona, Istanbul, San Francisco, and Venice
- Takashi Azumaya, an independent Japanese curator, died on October 16, 2012, at the age of 44. After working at the Setagaya Art Museum and the Mori Art Museum, he became the first non-Korean director of the Busan Biennale, which he organized in 2010
- Will Barnet, a painter and printmaker who lived and worked in New York for many decades, passed away on November 13, 2012. He was 101 years old. Barnet, who won CAA’s 2007 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement, had taught at the Art Students League and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, among other schools
- Marshall J. Bouldin III, a portraitist based in Mississippi who painted Richard Nixon’s daughters, died on November 12, 2012. He was 89 years old
- David C. Copley, the former owner and publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune and a philanthropist of the arts, died on November 20, 2012, at age 60. Copley was a member of board of directors for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
- Johanna Liesbeth de Kooning, the only daughter of the artist Willem de Kooning and the cofounder of his estate and trust, passed away on November 23, 2012. She was 56 years old
- Robert W. Duemling, the former director of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, and a board member of the Society of Architectural Historians, died on July 13, 2012, at age 83. Duemling had spent four years in naval intelligence and thirty years in the US Foreign Service after earning his master’s degree in the history of art and architecture from Yale University in 1953
- Jacques Dupin, a French poet and art critic, died on October 27, 2012, at the age of 85. A longtime director of Galerie Maeght in Paris, Dupin wrote the official biography of Joan Miró as well as ten monographs on the artist’s work
- Georgia Fee, the cofounder, chief executive officer, and editor-in-chief of Art Slant, died on December 8, 2012. Born in 1951, Fee developed Art Slant from a Los Angeles–based events calendar and online art magazine into a website with an international scope
- Gray Foy, a New York artist and socialite, passed away on November 23, 2012, at the age of 90. Foy received acclaim for his drawing and illustrations in the mid-twentieth century but became better known as a tastemaker and salonnier, hosting parties and events that boasted attendees as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, Cary Grant, and Susan Sontag
- Krisanne Frost, an artist based in San Antonio, Texas, and gallery liaison for the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, died on December 6, 2012. She was 61 years old
- Wendell Garrett, a historian and an appraiser on the television show Antiques Roadshow, died on November 14, 2012. He was 83. Among Garrett’s books are Victorian America: Classical Romanticism to Gilded Opulence (1993) and American Colonial: Puritan Simplicity to Georgian Grace (1995)
- Richard Gordon, a photographer and a maker of handmade books, died on October 6, 2012, at age 67. Gordon’s most recent collection of images are American Surveillance (2009) and Notes from the Field (2012)
- Rosalie B. Green, director of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University from 1951 to 1981, passed away on February 24, 2012. She was 94 years old
- Evelyn B. Harrison, a historian of Greek and Roman art and a professor in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University from 1974 to 2006, died on November 3, 2012, at the age of 92. She had previously taught at the University of Cincinnati, Columbia University, and Princeton University
- Alfred Kumalo, a South African photographer who document life under apartheid and the rise of Nelson Mandela, died on October 21, 2012. He was 82 years old
- Glenys Lloyd-Morgan, a Canadian-born archaeologist of ancient Rome, passed away on September 21, 2012, at the age of 67. Raised and educated in England, she worked at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester and as a finds consultant
- Arnaud Maggs, a Canadian photographer who shot portraits of Anne Murray and Leonard Cohen, died on November 17, 2012. He was 86 years old. Magg’s honors include a 2006 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and a 2012 Scotiabank Photography Award
- Margaret M. Martin, a watercolorist based in Allentown, New York, died on November 29, 2012, at the age of 72. Her love of gardening inspired many of her still lifes of flowers
- Menno Meewis, director of the Middelheimmuseum in Antwerp, Belgium, died on October 17, 2012, at age 58. He is credited with rejuvenating the museum and overseeing its expansion
- Patricia Meilman, a scholar of Venetian Renaissance art, died on October 13, 2012. She was 65 years old. Her books include Titian and the Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice and The Cambridge Companion to Titian
- Oscar Niemeyer, the renowned Brazilian architect, died on December 5, 2012, at the age of 104. He is best known for designing the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum and many government, commercial, and residential buildings for Brasília, his country’s new capital
- Catherine Burchfield Parker, an artist who spent thirty years of her career in Buffalo, New York, died on November 6, 2012, at age 85. She was the daughter of the painter Charles Burchfield
- Spain Rodriguez, an influential underground cartoonist based in San Francisco, California, died on November 28, 2012, at age 72. Rodriguez’s work was published by Zap Comics and in the East Village Other
- William Turnbull, a modernist sculptor from Scotland, died on November 15, 2012. He was 90. Turnbull’s career, which spanned seven decades, included forays in figurative, organic semiabstract, and hard-edged geometric styles, as well as painting
- Gudmund Vigtel, director of the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1963 to 1991, died on October 20, 2012. He was 87. Under his leadership the museum’s collection tripled in size and moved into a Richard Meier–designed building
- Albert Wadle, an art dealer and philanthropist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, died on November 12, 2012. He was 84 years old
- Shizuko Watari, the founder and director of Watari-um, the Watati Museum of Contemporary Art, in Japan, died on December 1, 2012, at age 80. She was also a curator and the director of Galerie Watari in Tokyo
- Larry Welden, an artist and educator based in Sacramento, California, died on October 25, 2012, at age 90. He taught art at Sacramento City College from 1960 to 1985, and his watercolors focused on the landscapes of Northern California
- Evelyn Williams, an English artist whose reliefs, drawings, and paintings were hard to categorize, died on November 14, 2012. She was 83 years old
- Lebbeus Woods, an unconventional architect who built only one permanent structure, died on October 30, 2012. He was 72 years old. Woods was a professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York.
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 January list.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — December 19, 2012
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.
Project to Put UK’s Publicly Owned Artworks Online Catalogues 200,000 Paintings
The Public Catalogue Foundation collaborated with more than three thousand venues across the United Kingdom to archive 211,861 paintings, many of which have never been photographed before. Every oil painting in public ownership is available online at the Your Paintings website—most of which are not currently on public display. Andrew Ellis, the foundation’s director, said: “No country has ever embarked on such a monumental project to showcase its entire oil painting collection online.” (Read more from the Telegraph.)
Freelance Professors
“Self-employed professor” could soon be an actual job title, thanks to two companies that are helping a small group of college professors market their own online courses, set prices for them, and share the tuition revenue. In January, StraighterLine will launch fifteen professor-taught courses. This is new territory for the company, which currently offers forty-two low-cost and self-paced online courses. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Help Desk: Internship Woes
I wrote the blog for a gallery for over six months without having my name attached. The blog did very well and was picked up on by a local magazine that asked the gallery owner to contribute a regular guest column for their publication. I proceeded to plan and outline the next six months of art-related subject matter with the pretext that I would be getting paid as my internship was completed. After the internship had ended, I wrote three posts for the gallery’s blog before the owner told me it was no longer in his budget. I was never paid for those entries, and my ideas continue to be used thereafter. Where do we draw the line on our unpaid time and efforts while aspiring to get recognition for the work that we do? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Harvard’s 3D-Printing Archaeologists Fix Ancient Artifacts
Indiana Jones practiced archaeology with a bullwhip and fedora. Joseph Greene and Adam Aja are using another unlikely tool: a 3D printer. Greene and Aja work at Harvard University’s Semitic Museum, using 3D printers and 3D scanning software to re-create a ceramic lion that was smashed three thousand years ago when Assyrians attacked the ancient Mesopotamian city of Nuzi, located in modern-day Iraq. (Read more from Wired.)
Are Curators a Vanishing Breed?
Strong support for California’s ambitious program to limit greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming was reconfirmed in a recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll, showing once more the state’s celebrated environmental consciousness. So perhaps it’s time at least to ring a warning bell about a puzzling situation in Los Angeles’ cultural environment, rather than its natural one. At area art museums, the job of chief curator appears to be edging toward the endangered species list. Three notable chief curators have left their museum jobs in the past year. Successors are nowhere in sight. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Friends and Rivals: Copley, West, Peale, Trumbull, and Stuart
The podcast of a lecture by Jules David Prown, recorded on October 15, 2003, presents the inaugural online offering of the Wyeth Lecture in American Art, a biennial event hosted by the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. (Read more from the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts.)
In the Thick of It
I remember September. I recall staring at the postings on H-Net and bemoaning the absence of jobs. Now it’s November, and oh, how I long for September. My friends who went on the market last year complained about applying to sixty or more jobs, but by late August I could count only fifteen or so that I could reasonably convince myself were suitable—not because the others were too far away, or the teaching load was too heavy, but because I couldn’t conceive of any way to assert that I was a good candidate. Where, I wondered, would those many additional job ads come from? (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
When Nasty Reviews Strike: What’s the Role of the Reviewer?
The question of the value of nasty reviews of cultural products has been in the news a lot lately, but it’s an issue that has been debated for as long as I can remember. I remember publishing in the Globe and Mail in about 1990 an article discouraging the writing of negative reviews of books from tiny local presses. I can’t remember exactly what my argument was, and it seems like a silly idea now. (Read more from the Globe and Mail.)
Cassone Subscriptions for Student Members
posted by Christopher Howard — December 12, 2012
Cassone: The International Online Magazine of Art and Art Books is offering a free one-year subscription to all first-year students at any level (BA, MA, BSc, diploma, PhD, etc.) and in any subject. But time is running out—this offer is running only until December 31, 2012. Please pass the information below to your friends, colleagues, and students.
To obtain your free Cassone subscription, please go to www.cassone-art.com/subscription/register. Enter your email address in the box on the left and click the “Begin registration” button immediately underneath it. On the next page, type in your personal details. By the time you get to the page’s footer, a validation code email should have turned up in your email inbox (if not, check your junk folder). Copy and paste the code into the box marked with this phrase: “Please copy and paste the validation code just emailed to you into the box below.” Tick the two boxes under that (legal requirement) and the third box (optional) if you wish and click “Complete registration.” Then follow the onscreen instructions. On the page titled “Step 2: Activate your subscription,” you will see a box headed “Got a gift voucher or discount code?” In that box, copy and paste the code: STUDent12. Then click on “Apply voucher.” Your yearlong subscription has begun.
If you have any questions, please contact Cassone at production@cassone-art.com. For students beyond their first year, a subscription is only £5 per year and for nonstudents £10.
December 2012 Issue of The Art Bulletin
posted by Christopher Howard — December 12, 2012
The December 2012 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, presents the fourth installment of a feature series that will continue through at least 2013. In Regarding Art and Art History, Rebecca Zorach reflects on politics and teaching. The subject of this issue’s Notes from the Field is detail, with twelve texts by artists, scholars, professors, conservators, and archaeologists: Susan Hiller, Spike Bucklow, Johannes Endres, Carlo Ginzburg, Joan Kee, Spyros Papapetros, Adrian Rifkin, Joanna Roche, Nina Rowe, Alain Schnapp, Blake Stimson, and Robert Williams. The Interview presents the German art historian Horst Bredekamp in conversation with the American scholar Christopher Wood. An installation view of Hiller’s Witness (2002), as seen as Tate London, appears on the cover.
The opening three long-form essays address the art of Italy. The first, by J. Keith Doherty, offers a new interpretation of the Judgment of Paris myth as it is depicted in Roman wall paintings. Robert Glass’s contribution, “Filarete’s Hilaritas: Claiming Authorship and Status on the Doors of St. Peter’s,” is a close reading of the Italian Renaissance sculptor’s bronze relief on the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. David M. Stone’s article, “Signature Killer: Caravaggio and the Poetics of Blood,” considers the artist’s signature in his Beheading of Saint John the Baptist from 1608. Luisa Elena Alcalá’s “‘A Call to Action’: Visual Persuasion in a Spanish American Painting” analyzes a Central American painting from the mid-1680s sent to Madrid from Mexico as a tactic to lobby for continued royal support. Finally, Philip Cottrell explores the unpublished papers of the nineteenth-century English connoisseur George Scharf, who organized the celebrated exhibition Art Treasures of the United Kingdom in Manchester in 1857.
The Reviews section leads off with David J. Roxburgh’s take on the new galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Next, Elizabeth Hill Boone considers Carolyn Dean’s A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock, and Jesús Escobar looks at Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru. Nicola Suthor’s book Bravura: Virtuosität und Mutwilligkeit in der Malerei der Frühen Neuzeit is appraised by Andreas Beyer, and Molly Emma Aitken’s study The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting, is evaluated by Pika Ghosh. The section concludes with Michael Leja’s assessment of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas.
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 March 2013, will feature essays on the strategic use of microarchitecture in Christian ivory carvings of the thirteenth century, perspectival “distortions” in Paul Cézanne’s paintings and the political implications of his repudiation of perspective, and appellations of photography that circulated in China between 1840 and 1911, which trace the emergence of a new understanding of visual truth in Chinese art.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — December 12, 2012
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.
Openness, Value, and Scholarly Societies: The MLA Model
In 2011, the Modern Language Association established a new office of scholarly communication and began a series of experiments in ways of supporting the open exchange of scholarly work among its members. While the office and its platforms are new, the motivating force behind the office is not. From the beginning, scholarly societies were designed to play a crucial role in facilitating communication between scholars working on common subjects. (Read more from College and Research Libraries News.)
Ten Essential Apps for the Mobile Artist
Michelangelo, Raphael, and the rest of the old masters drew everything they saw, everywhere they went. The new masters of the twenty-first century can still adhere to that artistic custom, with powerful apps designed for a mobile and creative world. GeekSugar has rounded up apps with specific media in mind, such as ink, charcoal, and watercolor, and more general-purpose digital drawing tools, too. When inspiration unexpectedly strikes, modern-day artists will be grateful they had these ten essential iOS drawing apps in their mobile toolkit. (Read more from GeekSugar.)
Monday Musings: The Price of a Free Membership
I’ve been following with interest the news that the Dallas Museum of Art is abolishing admission for the permanent exhibits and offering free memberships to all. I hear with increasing frequency from colleagues in cultural nonprofits that people don’t want to make long-term commitments such as season passes or memberships anymore and want their experiences a la carte; and that people want real and meaningful engagement with organizations—they don’t want to be anonymous, interchangeable customers. Making memberships free in response to these drivers of change seems like a reasonable experiment. But how does the math work out? (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
Museum Policies and Art Images: Conflicting Objectives and Copyright Overreaching
Museums face steady demand for images of artworks from their collections, and they typically provide a service of making and delivering high-resolution images of art. The images are often intellectually essential for scholarly study and teaching, and they are sometimes economically valuable for production of the coffee mugs and note cards sold in museum shops and elsewhere. Though the law is unclear regarding copyright protection afforded to such images, many museum policies and licenses encumber the use of art images with contractual terms and license restrictions often aimed at raising revenue or protecting the integrity of the art. (Read more from the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media, and Entertainment Law Journal.)
A New (Kind of) Scholarly Press
The FAQ to go with the announcement that Amherst College is launching a new scholarly press ends with the question “Isn’t this endeavor wildly idealistic?” The answer is yes. But Amherst thinks that there may be long-term gains—both for scholarship and the economics of academic publishing—by publishing books that are subject to traditional peer review, edited with rigor, and then published in digital form only, completely free. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
The Moment of Digital Art History?
Two thousand and twelve has proven to be a significant year as art history continues its transition into the sphere of the digital humanities. The following post aims to provide a summary of discussions around “digital art history,” which at present describes a mode of practice without a fully articulated definition. This summary will also extend beyond the institutional considerations primarily expressed in recent reports and consider the implications for digital art history on public engagement, including the involvement of new-media practitioners, such as bloggers and users of social-media platforms. (Read more from 3 Pipe Problem.)
If He Did It
In trying to figure out the why—no seriously, WHY?—of Bob Dylan’s second painting exhibition at Gagosian, Gallerist NY’s Michael Miller was left with the same Only Possible Explanation that’s been dogging me since the musician’s first baffling Gagosian gig in October 2011: “All I could come up with was a conspiracy theory cooked up by a friend, that both of Mr. Dylan’s shows at Gagosian are actually the work of Richard Prince using ‘Bob Dylan’ as a pseudonym, making the ultimate statement on art and artifice, and proving once and for all that Bob Dylan is whoever you want him to be.” (Read more from Greg.org.)
USC and MOCA Are in Talks about “A Possible Partnership”
Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art and the University of Southern California are in talks about a possible partnership that would link the ambitious private university with the fiscally struggling downtown museum. Responding to Los Angeles Times inquiries, USC’s provost Elizabeth Garrett said that discussions are underway “about a possible partnership that would enhance the missions of both institutions.” Talks “are very preliminary at this time,” she added, providing no further details. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
Recipients of CAA’s Meiss and Wyeth Publishing Grants
posted by Christopher Howard — December 11, 2012
CAA has awarded grants to the publishers of eighteen books in art history and visual culture through two programs: the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant.
Wyeth Grant Recipients
CAA is pleased to announce seven recipients of the annual Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, established in 2005. Thanks to a generous grant from the Wyeth Foundation, these awards are given annually to publishers to support the publication of one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects. For this grant program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico through 1970.
Receiving 2012 grants are:
- Katherine A. Bussard, Unfamiliar Streets: Photographs by Richard Avedon, Charles Moore, Martha Rosler, and Philip-Lorca DiCorcia, Yale University Press
- Melissa Dabakis, The American Corinnes: Women Sculptors and the Eternal City, 1850–1876, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Michael Lobel, Becoming an Artist: John Sloan, the Ashcan School, and Popular Illustration, Yale University Press
- Amy F. Ogata, Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America, University of Minnesota Press
- John Ott, Manufacturing the Modern Patron in Victorian California: Cultural Philanthropy, Industrial Capital, and Social Authority, Ashgate
- Rachel Sailor, Meaningful Places: Local Landscape Photography in the Nineteenth-Century American West and Its Legacy, University of New Mexico Press
- George E. Thomas, Frank Furness and the Poetry of the Present: Architecture in the Age of the Great Machines, University of Pennsylvania Press
Eligible for the grant are book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
Meiss Grant Winners
This fall, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of eleven books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The grantees for fall 2012 are:
- Paroma Chatterjee, The Living Icon in Medieval Art, Cambridge University Press
- Anthony Colantuono and Steven F. Ostrow, eds., Critical Perspectives on Early Modern Roman Sculpture, Pennsylvania State University Press
- T. J. Demos, Migrations: The Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis, Duke University Press
- Jennifer Doyle, Hold It against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art, Duke University Press
- Dorita Hannah, Event Space: Theatre Architecture and the Historical Avant-Garde, Routledge
- Cara Krmpotich and Laura Peers, This Is Our Life: Haida People, Collections, and International Museums, University of British Columbia Press
- Asa Simon Mittman and Susan M. Kim, Inconceivable Beasts: The Wonders of the East in the Beowulf Manuscript, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
- Bibiana Obler, Intimate Collaborations: Gender, Craft, and the Emergence of Abstraction, Yale University Press
- Dorothy C. Rowe, After Dada: Marta Hegemann and the Cologne Avant-Garde, Manchester University Press
- Linda Safran, Art and Identity in the Medieval Salento, University of Pennsylvania Press
- Robert Slifkin, Out of Time: Philip Guston and the Refiguration of Postwar American Art, University of California Press
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
Image: The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts building, built by the American architects Frank Furness and George Hewitt, opened in 1876 (photograph by the Detroit Publishing Company, 1900)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — December 06, 2012
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.
NEH Solicits Comments on Digital Projects for the Public Grant Program Guidelines
The National Endowment for the Humanities will launch a new Digital Projects for the Public grant program in fiscal year 2014 and seeks public comment on its proposed guidelines. The new program will fund humanities projects using digital formats such as websites, mobile applications, games, social media, and virtual environments to reach the public and foster lifelong learning. (Read more from the National Endowment for the Humanities.)
“Can I Use This?” How Museum and Library Image Policies Undermine Education
Although eight years have passed since Eastman Kodak announced that it would stop manufacturing slide projectors, we have built only a fragmented system for distributing high-quality digital images—one that is failing our students, our discipline, and the public. More has changed than the technology we use to illustrate our lectures. (Read more from E-Literate.)
Who Owns Captured Lectures?
Lecture-capture technology has advanced to a point where implementing a solution can be disarmingly simple. But it’s important for faculty and administrators not to be lulled into a false sense of security—recording faculty and guest lectures still comes with its share of legal issues covering copyright, intellectual-property rights, distribution, and permissions. While some lecture-capture technology provides assistance even in these areas, colleges and universities need to develop clearly defined guidelines on how recorded lectures can be used. (Read more from Campus Technology.)
The Genomics of Art, Education, and Commerce
Recently I blogged about Art.sy, a service built on the Art Genome Project that enables users to discover, learn about, and collect art that is suggested to them via a mathematical algorithm. That post provoked so much interesting discussion that I followed up with Christine Kuan, chief curator and director of strategic partnerships at Art.sy, to relay some of the questions raised by commentators related to Art.sy’s educational goals, its for-profit business model, and its relationship to the art world. (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
Bucking Conventional Wisdom: Arts Graduates Gauge Success Differently
A new report by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project offers important new insights into the value of an arts school education, countering prevailing views about salary levels and job prospects as the most important indicators of alumni satisfaction and career success. Called Painting with Broader Strokes: Reassessing the Value of an Arts Degree, the report offers insights into the careers and perspectives of 13,851 arts graduates from 154 institutions surveyed in 2010, shedding new light on educational training and experiences, employment paths, involvement in the arts outside work, and overall job satisfaction and income. (Read more from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project.)
A Different Kind of Application Fee
A tenure-track job is surely a valuable commodity, but would you pay for a shot at one? A listing for a faculty painting position at Colorado State University attracted some heat on Twitter when several academics noticed the $15 fee attached to the position. The job ad states simply: “In lieu of postage and duplication costs you will be charged a fee of $15.” (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Ten No-Nonsense Tips for Landing a Career in the Art World
Congratulations, you’ve got your shiny degree in curating, art history, or critical theory. Now, how will you make your way in the notoriously cutthroat art world? Sophie Macpherson is the right person to ask. Her company, Sophie Macpherson Ltd, is the leading art recruitment agency, with a London office and representatives in Paris, New York, and soon, East Asia. (Read more from Blouin Artinfo.)
What’s Hot, What’s Not
Frieze shares what terms are hot, not, and holding steady in the world of artist’s statement. What’s hot? An art practice that “is transversal,” “inhabits a transgendered space,” “is post-/para-fictional,” and “references both my height and the height of my bedroom ceiling when I was a teenager.” (Read more from Frieze.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — November 28, 2012
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.
Register for Arts Advocacy Day
The 2012 election has made a dramatic impact on Congress, with more than eighty new members taking office in early January 2013. The next Congress will renew the focus on reducing the federal deficit and creating jobs, and it is imperative that arts advocates work together to craft a policy agenda that supports the nonprofit arts sector and arts education. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)
Humanities Advocacy Day Registration
Registration for Humanities Advocacy Day and the annual meeting of the National Humanities Alliance will help you to connect with a growing network of humanities leaders, to communicate the value of the humanities to members of Congress, and to become a year-round advocate for the humanities. (Read more from the National Humanities Alliance.)
How Art History Is Failing at the Internet
The history of art as practiced in museums and the academy is sluggish in its embrace of the new technology. Of course we have technology in our galleries and classrooms and information on the web; of course we are exploiting social media to reach and grow our audiences, by tweeting about our books and articles, including links to our career accomplishments on Facebook, and chatting with our students online. But we aren’t conducting art-historical research differently. We aren’t working collaboratively and experimentally. (Read more at the Daily Dot.)
Grad School Confidential: How to Choose the Right Degree
Graduate school is hard. It’s also really expensive. But if you’re actually going to invest the time and money to do it, make it count for yourself. If you need a good graduate school to be able to do the things you want to do, aim high. You can go online and check the US News and World Report rankings, of course. And there are some damn good schools on that list. But if you choose a graduate school based on the institution’s reputation alone, you may find yourself in a discipline or among peers that simply don’t suit you. (Read more at Burnaway.)
More on Pedagogy in Arts Entrepreneurship
As I’ve been working on a pedagogical approach for emerging arts entrepreneurs, I’ve immersed myself in literature and resources on creative thinking and creative problem solving. What keeps striking me is the stark difference between creativity as applied in the development of complex ideas and the creative process in the making of art. The former lends itself, at least to a great degree, to techniques, processes, and formulae, while the making of art does not. One is rational, the other un-rational. (Read more at State of the Art.)
Shift in Heritage: Richard Serra Sculpture Has Uncertain Future
The closest thing southern Ontario has to Stonehenge is Shift, a sculpture by Richard Serra in a King City farmer’s field. Serra is a superstar artist whose work is worth millions of dollars, but Shift remains relatively obscure. Though many places would envy our big Serra, last month the Ontario Conservation Review Board decided not to support King Township’s request that Serra’s work be protected under the Ontario Heritage Act, so its future remains uncertain. (Read more at the Toronto Star.)
Dating and Job Hunting
Last January, I returned mentally and emotionally exhausted from the American Historical Association meeting. I had been lucky to have had a few interviews, and all I could do was refresh my email every few minutes, hoping for any updates. I toggled over to Facebook and quickly posted the status, “If the academic job market is like dating (and it totally is) I hope to be engaged by Valentine’s Day.” The likes and comments poured in from family and friends. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
Masterpieces on Loan Leave MFA Walls Lacking
Visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this holiday season can see the celebrity and fashion photographs of Mario Testino. But if they wander off into the permanent collection galleries, they won’t find the museum’s most famous Renoir, Dance at Bougival. Nor will they see any of the museum’s five paintings by Cezanne, five of its six great paintings by Manet, its most distinctive Monet, or its two greatest van Goghs. Some of these works have been lent to serious and scholarly museum shows in the United States, Japan, and Europe. Agreeing to such loans is common practice and builds goodwill for when the museum asks to borrow for its own exhibitions. (Read more at the Boston Globe.)
Robert Storr Is Convocation Speaker
posted by Christopher Howard — November 27, 2012
Robert Storr, dean of the Yale University School of Art and a former senior curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2013 Annual Conference in New York. Convocation, which includes the presentation of the 2013 CAA Awards for Distinction, will take place on Wednesday evening, February 13, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. Free and open to the public, the event will be held in the East Ballroom, on the second floor of the Hilton New York in midtown Manhattan.
Storr joined the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA in 1990, where he has organized solo exhibitions on Elizabeth Murray (2005–6), Max Beckmann (2003), Gerhard Richter (2002), Chuck Close (1998), Tony Smith (1998), and Robert Ryman (1993–94). He also coordinated the Projects series at the museum from 1990 to 2000. More recently, Storr served as commissioner of the 2007 Venice Biennale, which was titled Think with the Senses, Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense. He was the first American invited to the position.
A painter and a critic, Storr has written on art for Art in America, where he has been a contributing editor since 1981, and for Frieze, where he wrote a regular column from 2004 to 2011. In addition to publishing books on Close and Philip Guston, he has recently completed Intimate Geometries: The Work and Life of Louise Bourgeois (forthcoming).
Storr earned a BA from Swarthmore College in 1972 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. The recipient of numerous grants, awards, and honors, he has lectured at colleges and universities throughout the northeastern United States. Storr began his official academic career in 2002, leaving MoMA to become the first Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. Storr joined Yale in 2006 as dean and was recently reappointed to that position for a second five-year term. He is also professor of painting and printmaking at his school.
Storr has intersected with CAA at various points throughout his career. He has chaired several Annual Conference sessions and has spoken on even more. He served on the Art Journal Editorial Board from 1985 to 1995 and, with the attorney Barbara Hoffman, guest edited two issues on censorship and the visual arts, in fall and winter 1991. A ever-passionate advocate, Storr took up the issue again in 2011, writing a piece in Frieze on the Hide/Seek controversy.
On Tuesday, February 12, a day before Convocation, Storr will participate on a panel, titled “Hands On,” at the New York Studio School in Greenwich Village. Joining him will be the art historians Svetlana Alpers, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, and David Rosand, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History Emeritus at Columbia University, who will discuss the connections between making art and writing about it. David Cohen, an art critic and the editor of Artcritical.com, will moderate. The event, starting at 6:30 PM, is free and open to the public; seating, however, may be limited.
Image: Robert Storr (photograph by Herbert Lotz)
Finalists for the 2013 Morey and Barr Awards
posted by Christopher Howard — November 19, 2012
CAA is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2013 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award. The winners of both prizes, along with the recipients of ten other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in January and presented during Convocation in New York, in conjunction with the 101st Annual Conference.
The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2011, and August 31, 2012. The four finalists are:
- Esra Akcan, Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey, and the Modern House (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)
- Mary K. Coffey, How a Revolutionary Art Became Official Culture: Murals, Museums, and the Mexican State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012)
- Cynthia Hahn, Strange Beauty: Issues in the Making and Meaning of Reliquaries, 400–circa 1204 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012)
- J. P. Park, Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012)
The Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for museum scholarship is presented to the author(s) of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published between September 1, 2011, and August 31, 2012, under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. The two finalists are:
- Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon, eds., Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012)
- Luke Syson with Larry Keith, Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (London: National Gallery, 2011)
The Barr jury has shortlisted a second Barr Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, or Collections. The two finalists are:
- Joanne Pillsbury, Miriam Doutriaux, Reiko Ishihara-Brito, and Alexandre Tokovinine, eds., Ancient Maya Art at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2012)
- Anne T. Woollett, Yvonne Szafran, and Alan Phenix, Drama and Devotion: Heemskerck’s “Ecce Homo” Altarpiece from Warsaw (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2012)
The presentation of the 2013 Awards for Distinction will take place on Wednesday evening, February 13, 5:30–7:00 PM, at the Hilton New York. The event is free and open to the public. For more information about CAA’s Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs and archivist.