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.

Great Colleges to Work For 2016

The annual “Great Colleges to Work For” survey was administered between March 14 and April 15. All survey-related content in this issue, including college presidents’ statements about what makes their institution a great place to work, was provided by ModernThink, which drew institutional data from the colleges and the US Department of Education. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture?

Despite the increased emphasis in recent years on improving professors’ teaching skills, such training often focuses on incorporating technology or flipping the classroom, rather than on how to give a traditional college lecture. It’s also in part why the lecture—a mainstay of any introductory undergraduate course—is endangered. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

What Learning People Really Think about Lecturing

Is there really a war on lecturing going on across higher education?  Do learning professionals want to kill the lecture? Read Christine Gross-Loh’s “Should Colleges Really Eliminate the College Lecture?” and you would be forgiven in thinking that there is and that we do. The problem is that her description of the current climate bears little resemblance to reality. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

These Four Technologies May Finally Put an End to Art Forgery

Like method actors and bearded brewmasters, the best art forgers are obsessed with authenticity. But thanks to a handful of new authentication technologies, even history’s most painstaking efforts wouldn’t stump today’s art sleuths. (Read more from Artsy.)

How the Rich Are Hurting the Museums They Fund

For museum executives, the dirty secret of expansions has been that they are often motivated by the need to have some exciting new thing to rally board members and interest potential patrons. These institutions depend heavily on rich people to fund them. Those rich people like to pay for flashy new buildings; no one wants to donate to boring old museum upkeep. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Supporting Transgender Students in the Classroom

As the higher-education community continues to work to create a more inclusive learning environment, the needs of gender-variant students are too often overlooked. This article outlines a few ways faculty can create an atmosphere that supports trans-identified and gender-nonconforming students. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

The Way We Publish Now

All signs point toward an open-access future for scholarship. The pressure from funders as well as from academic authors to publish openly is growing. So is the convergence of the affordances of open web–enabled publishing with the present-day means of scholarly conversation, much of it online. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

How to Resign

Leaving an academic job is different than vacating a nonacademic one. A professor can’t just give two weeks’ notice and walk out the door. I’ve submitted my share of resignation letters and watched others leave their posts, so I’ve gleaned a few tips on how to depart a faculty position gracefully. (Read more from Vitae.)

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.

Life beyond Art School: What Next, Where Next, and How to Make It Happen

A recent symposium held in Glasgow and organized jointly by Glasgow School of Art and Q-Art saw fine-art staff, students, and industry professionals examine the role of art schools and how they prepare students for life after university. Laura Campbell reports on the issues raised and the possible solutions. (Read more from a-n.)

Black Bodies, White Cubes: The Problem with Contemporary Art’s Appropriation of Race

As new political movements like Black Lives Matter have gained influence, social practice has risen in stature and popularity. But a new wave of contemporary work influenced by racial injustices is decidedly more sensational. Artists have made systemic racism look sexy; galleries have made it desirable for collectors. (Read more from ARTnews.)

Who’s Going to Fix My Broken Art?

I shipped a ceramic sculpture across the country to a gallery for an important group show, and they said it was broken when they unpacked it—as in, shattered to pieces. I spent an absurd amount of time and money packing it up so that nothing would break. Is it wrong to ask the gallery to pay for the damage? (Read more from Burnaway.)

The Library of Last Resort

Responsibility for restoring the Library of Congress’s digital mandate has fallen to Carla Hayden. The job she has before her is to prepare the library to serve another century of US citizens that has become most accustomed to consuming information on the internet. (Read more from N+1.)

Rethinking Knowledge in the Internet Age

The internet started out as an assured tool for generating a well-informed citizenry. Over the past fifteen years, that optimism has given way to cynicism and fear—we have taught our children that the net is a swamp of lies spun by idiots and true believers and polluted by commercial entities whose sole aim is to have us click to the next ad-riddled page. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)

Why Doing Something as Dull as Copyright Registration Gives You Stronger Rights

Like all things legal, copyright registration is boring and costs money—a standard electronic application costs $55. This is why the task tends to sit at the bottom of the never-ending to-do list that many creators make but never get through. (Read more from the Copyright Alliance.)

New Measures Initiated to Remedy the Surprising Pitfalls of Collecting Video Art

What are you actually buying when you purchase a work of video art? The answer isn’t quite what the uninitiated might expect. The tricky nature of video art has proven to be an unpleasant surprise for collectors in the past. (Read more from Artsy.)

Why Most Academics Will Always Be Bad Writers

For at least a generation, academics have elaborately and publicly denounced the ponderous pedantry of academic prose. So why haven’t these ponderous pedants improved, already? The critics would say the ponderous pedants are doing it on purpose. (Read more from 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.

Academic Libraries and the Textbook Taboo: Time to Get Over It?

Librarians have allowed an unfortunate limitation of the print world to shape not only their behaviors but also their philosophy, to the point that many of us perceive excluding textbooks as a defining value of librarianship—not a service we regretfully forego because it’s not feasible, but a service we forego because “That’s not who we are as librarians.” (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

Textbooks in Academic Libraries: The Publisher’s Case

There is no precise and inarguable definition of a college textbook. Even the lines that define “college” are blurry: Do we mean elite, private schools like Harvard and Stanford; four-year state institutions; community colleges; the for-profit world; or MOOCs? The “college textbook,” in other words, is a slippery concept, and it is important to know exactly what someone means when uttering it. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

When College Students Need Food Pantries More Than Textbooks

As a more racially and socioeconomically diverse body of students pursues college in the United States, schools find themselves responding to more requests to stock food pantries and hand out vouchers for supplies at campus bookstores. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

How the Art World Responded to AIDS

How artists grappled—and continue to grapple—with the epidemic is the focus of Art AIDS America, an exhibition at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. In some 120 works by close to one hundred artists, the show captures the rage, anguish, and overwhelming sense of loss that accompanied the epidemic at its height, along with the activism it sparked and its continuing reverberation through the culture. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)

The State: A Friend Indeed to Artists in Need?

Createquity imagines that a healthy arts ecosystem is one in which opportunities to make one’s living as an artist are distributed equitably across socioeconomic levels. Unfortunately, this is not the case in many Western countries, where research indicates that people of lesser means are not as equipped to take on the risk involved in pursuing a career in the arts. (Read more from Createquity.)

Wonders and Blunders: What Makes a Great Museum?

What makes a museum building successful? Until the arrival of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao in 1997, this question may have exclusively focused on the best environments in which to view art. But the Guggenheim’s phenomenal success, which allowed the Basque government to recoup the construction costs within three years, moved the debate on to issues of branding and statement architecture. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Five Time-Saving Strategies for the Flipped Classroom

I often hear comments like “The flipped classroom takes too much time,” “I don’t have time to devise so many new teaching strategies,” “It takes too much time to record and edit videos,” or “I don’t have time to cover everything on the syllabus.” I also hear “I tried to flip my class, but it was exhausting; so I quit.” If these comments sound familiar, it might be helpful to create margins in your flipped classroom. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

Real Estate for the 1 Percent, with Art for the Masses

Richard Serra, a stickler about the differences between art and architecture, once described most public sculpture in urban architectural settings as “displaced, homeless, overblown objects that say, ‘We represent modern art.’” In twentieth-century New York, residential and commercial developments tended to marry architecture and art with that kind of ambivalence, if they married them at all: lobbies with a few pretty, unremarkable paintings; courtyards with pleasant design pieces; or plop art by sculptors whose work rarely showed up in the museums around town. (Read more from the New York Times.)

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 Secret History of US Women Painters

Maurine St. Gaudens is an art conservator and the author of Emerging from the Shadows: A Survey of Women Artists Working in California, 1860–1960, a massive full-color, four-volume labor of love and scholarship. She and Joseph Morsman have compiled narratives of 320 female artists working in California in a century underscored with turmoil and change, from the Gilded Age to the world wars to the Great Depression. (Read more from the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

Eleven Artists Who Helped Pave the Way to Marriage Equality

Last year the US Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right—a victory representing long-sought political recognition and validation of identities that have been largely marginalized and stigmatized. To mark this political milestone, Artsy has highlighted eleven artists whose work demonstrates the power visual culture has to explore, share, and make relatable queer narratives. (Read more from Artsy.)

Does “African” Architecture Exist? This Rwandan Architect Thinks So

There aren’t that many African architects out there—Christian Benimana is one of the few. He completed his bachelor degree in 2008 at Tongji University in Shanghai before returning home to Rwanda to forge his career. Awut Atak spoke to Benimana about where Africa’s cities are heading—and what “African” architecture actually is. (Read more from True Africa.)

It’s an Art Gallery. No, a Living Room. OK, Both.

Since the 2008 economic downturn, temporary do-it-yourself art galleries have proliferated in apartments, storefronts, and other spaces all over the country. Call it a response to an art world in which dealer representation is increasingly hard to come by; exhibitions are costly; and formerly affordable areas have priced out artists, forcing them to seek out scrappier locations in which to show their work. (Read more from the New York Times.)

The Digital in the Humanities: An Interview with David Golumbia

The term “digital humanities” has captured the imagination and ire of scholars across America. Supporters of the field, which melds computer science with hermeneutics, champion it as the much-needed means to shake up and expand methods of traditional literary interpretation; for critics, it is a new fad that symbolizes the neoliberal bean counting that is destroying higher education. (Read more from the Los Angeles Review of Books.)

The Improbable History of NYC’s Revolutionary Art School, the Art Students League

If the humble five-story building of the Art Students League on Fifty-Seventh Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue was always easy to overlook, now the massive construction site makes it almost impossible to find. Yet behind the scaffolding, the doors of this 140-year-old art school are still open, with a legacy of the most famous artists in America, such as Mark Rothko, Hans Hofmann, and Ai Weiwei. (Read more from the Gothamist.)

Art Demystified: What Determines an Artwork’s Value?

What determines an artwork’s value? And why are some works so expensive? To art-world outsiders, the distinctions in price can be confusing. What makes one artwork sell for $10,000 and another for $10 million—or even $100 million? (Read more from Artnet News.)

On Academic Envy

Recently I logged into Facebook and there, right at the top of my news feed, was a link to a colleague’s third published piece in the New Yorker. The same afternoon, two other colleagues were approached by a literary agent about writing a popular nonfiction book. (Read more from Vitae.)

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.

How Much Control Do Artists Have over a Work after It’s Sold?

Is authorship something that can be revoked at will? Under what authority can an artist disavow one of his or her works? How do artists exert control over their work long after it ceases to be their property? (Read more from Artsy.)

How Does Crowdfunding Change the Picture for Artists?

Crowdfunding is the piece of a platform-economy puzzle that represents something more genuinely new to the arts community than the gig economy. Part of the platform economy is the use of “the crowd” to provide value—whether work, information, or funding. Will Kickstarter and Indiegogo fundamentally tilt or redefine the arts funding landscape? And if so, how? (Read more from Creativ.)

Social Media Have Become a Vital Tool for Artists—but Are They Good for Art?

As in all other corners of public and private life, the advent of social media has transformed the ways in which artists interact with each other, their public, and the institutions that govern their careers. But the relationship between art and social media is a tricky one. The former is about pushing boundaries; the latter, enforcing them. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

What Does Student Engagement Look Like?

Engagement—it’s another one of those words that’s regularly bandied about in higher education. We talk about it like we know what it means and we do, sort of. It’s just that when a word or idea is so widely used, thinking about it often stops, and that’s what I think has happened with engagement. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

Racial Literacy as a Professor’s Responsibility

What should faculty members know about talking about race in the classroom? Everything from “everything” and “When you do not interrupt racism in the classroom, you perpetuate it” to “Do better!” and “They’ve already got many of resources they need to do it well.” That’s what Shaun Harper, professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania, said during his keynote address at the American Association of University Professors annual meeting. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

I Survived My First Year on the Tenure Track, but I’m Ready to Bail!

Now that I’ve survived my first year in a tenure-track position at a small liberal-arts college, all I want to do is curl up in a ball. A nonacademic position is opening up in my hometown. If I got the job, I’d still have adjunct faculty status and be able to supervise grad students. I’d also probably get a 30- to 50-percent salary increase. (Read more from Vitae.)

How Your Journal Editor Works

Your scholarly editor is a real person living in real time. Editors know we have power—a combination of gatekeeper, talent scout, and helpmate. Each of us wields those things with different emphases. I generally did my editorial work from my muddled campus office, especially during office hours when no one showed up. Or I turned to it late at night, as I plowed through my email after the kids went to bed. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Brexit Casts Uncertainty on Art Market

As the world’s leading auction houses prepared for their big-ticket contemporary sales in London, the question was on everybody’s mind: What will the shock and confusion following Britain’s vote to leave the European Union mean for the art market? With many in its commercial art world supporting the remain position, a pall has unmistakably been cast over the proceedings. (Read more from the New York Times.)

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.

Who Can Afford to Be a Starving Artist?

Take a minute and picture a world in which every adult on the planet is a full-time, professional artist. Arts funding and education are abundant, and folks spend their days in the studios, galleries, stages, pages, screens, and streets creating in collaborative groups or in Zenlike isolation. Would that be a good world to live in? (Read more from Createquity.)

Medieval Scots Used Art the Way We Use Social Media

Medieval Scots once gave each other postcard-sized artworks to forge social bonds, in the same way we post pictures on social media today, according to new research. The “postcards on parchment”—whose painted images included patron saints, the Virgin Mary and child, and highly decorated lettering—revealed status, allegiances, and values among the wealthy classes in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (Read more from the Scotsman.)

Learn from My Mistakes as a Dean

If you’re reading this, you most likely are either a new dean or you aspire to the job. Perhaps you are about to start your first deanship this summer. Whether you become a dean at your current institution or at a new one, here are a few things to keep in mind—advice entirely based on what I did wrong in my first few years as a dean. (Read more from Vitae.)

Wrap Up Your Dissertation with a Writing Plan

Anyone pursuing a graduate degree has experienced the feeling that a project will go on forever. Writing a dissertation can be, and quite often is, the biggest academic undertaking that many of us have experienced. Grant applications, manuscripts, and literature reviews pale in comparison to the size of the average dissertation, and writing one can be an incredibly intimidating goal. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

How Do I Get My Foot in the Art World?

I’m a recent grad and want to learn more about the art world, so hopefully, one day, I can work in the arts. I didn’t major in art, but I took several art history and art classes and really loved them. I also love going to galleries and museums. Could you give me some suggestions on how to learn more? (Read more from Burnaway.)

Making “Skins” with Fluid Acrylics

An acrylic “skin” is a dry acrylic film that can be made of paint, medium, or a combination of paint and medium, that is not attached to any substrate. While acrylic skins can be made with just about any acrylic medium, gel, paste, or paint, fluid acrylics work particularly well since the consistency allows for easy pouring and spreading onto a casting surface. (Read more from Just Paint.)

Using Computers to Better Understand Art

A new field of research aims to deepen, and even quantify, our understanding of the aesthetic experience. Visual stylometry uses computational and statistical methods to calculate and compare underlying image features in ways humans never could before. Instead of relying only on what our senses perceive, we can use mathematical techniques to discover novel insights into artists and artworks. (Read more from the Conversation.)

Getty Research Portal Grows with a New Design and More Than 100,000 Digitized Volumes

Marking the occasion of its four-year anniversary, the Getty Research Portal has been rebuilt and redesigned, making it easier to explore the digitized literature of art history. The portal is a catalogue providing free access to books and journals made available online by contributing institutions. (Read more from the Getty Iris.)