CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jul 03, 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.
Images of Works of Art in Museum Collections: The Experience of Open Access
This report describes the current approach of eleven art museums in the United States and the United Kingdom to the use of images of works of art in their collections, where the underlying works are in the public domain. Each approach is slightly different. By presenting the thought processes and methods of these institutions, this report aims to inform the decision making of other museums that are considering open access to images in their collections. (Read more from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.)
SNAAP Report Focuses on the Impact of Gender, Race, and Socioeconomic Status on Arts Graduates
Findings from a national study released last week by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) show that a postsecondary arts education affords some unique advantages for women, minorities, and disadvantaged students. However, significant gaps remain and inequalities persist related to school debt, racial diversity within artistic occupations, and disparities in earnings by gender. The report, An Uneven Canvas: Inequalities in Artistic Training and Careers, details findings from more than 65,000 arts alumni of all ages from 120 institutions in the United States and Canada. (Read more from Indiana University.)
Warhol Foundation Settles Case against Insurance Firm
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has reached a settlement with the Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company, ending a case that lasted more than two years. The company agreed to pay the “lion’s share” of the foundation’s legal fees stemming from two lawsuits brought by the collectors Joe Simon and Susan Shaer in 2007, according to a press release from the foundation. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
Of Mice and Manet
The humble mouse is a doughty workhorse of science. Every day, in laboratories around the world, the little critters are subjected to all manner of carefully controlled insults, from electric shocks to the induction of cancer, all in the name of research. But the mice in the lab of Shigeru Watanabe, a psychologist at Keio University in Japan, have a more enjoyable life than most. Specifically, he is exploring their taste in fine art. (Read more in the Economist.)
Five Facts about Professional Artists in the United States
Instagram and Etsy have made everyone seem like artistic geniuses, but according to the National Endowment for the Arts, artists make up only 1.4 percent of the US labor force. Last week, we learned much more about the roughly 2 million artists in the workforce thanks to the NEA study, “Equal Opportunity Data Mining: National Statistics about Working Artists.” The study, based on census data, classifies artists by occupation, demographics, and region. Here are five of the more surprising findings. (Read more in the Washington Post.)
Museums Faulted on Restitution of Nazi-Looted Art
Not until 1998, when forty-four nations including the United States signed the groundbreaking Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art, did governments and museums formally embrace the idea that they have a special responsibility to repair the damage caused by the wholesale looting of art owned by Jews during the Third Reich’s reign. Now, fifteen years later, historians, legal experts, and Jewish groups say that some American museums have backtracked on their pledge to settle Holocaust recovery claims on the merits. (Read more in the New York Times.)
The Googleheim Museum of Art
Google may have set out to “organize the world’s information,” but thanks to the creativity of a huge variety of artists, designers, hackers, and other tinkerers it’s become something else: an art museum hidden within a search engine. Because a slew of people have found clever ways to exploit or misuse Google’s tools and algorithms and endless troves of data, Google has accidentally become a mother lode of artistic inspiration (and, often humorously, a passive artistic collaborator.) (Read more from Yahoo News.)
Amazon to Launch Virtual Art Gallery
Amazon.com is expected to launch an online art gallery later this year. The online retailer of books, electronics, and apparel aims to offer over 1,000 art objects from at least 125 galleries, according to dealers who have been approached by the website’s business-development group. Amazon executives told one dealer that 109 galleries have already agreed to participate. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 26, 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.
Humanities Committee Sounds an Alarm
A new national corps of “master teachers” trained in the humanities and social sciences and increased support for research in “endangered” liberal-arts subjects are among the recommendations of a major report delivered last week on Capitol Hill. The report comes amid concern about low humanities enrollments and worries that the Obama administration’s emphasis on science education risks diminishing a huge source of the nation’s intellectual strength. (Read more in the New York Times.)
The Humanities “Crisis”—Are Museums and Higher Education Doing All They Can?
Our public museums and libraries and our colleges and universities occupy a privileged cultural space and have earned respect born of their missions to foster and disseminate knowledge. By historical standards, public museums and libraries have been open institutions, and more people than ever are taking advantage of higher education. But what is possible in terms of scale and what constitutes “open” have moved fast and far recently. To date, most museums, colleges, and universities have not yet embraced the radical expansion to their missions that is now possible. (Read more in e-Literate.)
Do Unpaid Internships Lead to Jobs? Not for College Students
The common defense of the unpaid internship is that, even if the role doesn’t exactly pay, it will pay off eventually in the form of a job. Turns out, the data suggests that defense is wrong, at least when it comes to college students. For three years, the National Association of Colleges and Employers has asked graduating seniors if they’ve received a job offer and if they’ve ever had either a paid or unpaid internship. And for three years, it’s reached the same conclusion: unpaid internships don’t seem to give college kids much of a leg up when it comes time to look for employment. (Read more in the Atlantic.)
What Job-Placement Data Would Be Useful?
What data on the job placement of PhDs would be most useful to prospective graduate students and job candidates? “Any data at all,” came the reply from one respondent to an informal survey on graduate-school placement. The sense of frustration with the lack of reliable information was clear in the responses. The survey asked, “What data would be the most useful to you on the job-placement rates of individual PhD programs?” One respondent replied, “honest data; no lies.” Another wrote: “Any data would have been nice. I was given the impression that a PhD would lead to a job, but now I know that isn’t the case at all.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Half of Faculty Say Their Job Is More Difficult Today Than Five Years Ago
If you find yourself working longer hours or maybe feeling a bit more stressed at the end of the day, you’re not alone. Fifty percent of college faculty who completed the annual Faculty Focus reader survey said that their job is more difficult than it was five years ago. Only nine percent said their job is less difficult, while 33 percent said it’s about the same. (Read more in Faculty Focus.)
Arts and Culture Was Fastest-Growing Philanthropic Cause in 2012
Arts and culture was Americans’ fastest-growing charitable cause in 2012, rising an estimated 7.8 percent to $14.44 billion, according to a leading annual research report on charitable giving. Donations to education rose second fastest, with a 7 percent gain, according to the latest edition of Giving USA, issued last week by the Chicago-based Giving Institute and its research partner, the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
Help Desk: Getting Schooled
I’m an artist in my mid-twenties who has absolutely no formal education. So far I’ve managed to be fairly happy with small but very meaningful visibility, knowing that art making is about process and that it takes time to find one’s self. But I’m starting to hit a wall regarding the growth of my practice and am worried that my lack of “training” might be the problem, so I’m considering going to art school. How important do you think education is in order for someone to be or to become a professional artist? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Art Museums Better Hurry Up and Get Ready for the Future of 3D Printing
In his living room in San Diego right now, Cosmo Wenman has two life-sized reproductions of the British Museum’s Head of a Horse of Selene, a magnificently lifelike sculpture with flared nostrils that dates to about 432 BC. The original in Britain is made of marble, about three feet end to end. Wenman’s copies, created with an older digital camera and a MakerBot 3D printer, are clearly reproductions as soon as you lift them up. Created in plastic and coated in a bronze patina, they weigh about eight pounds each. (Read more in the Atlantic.)
People in the News
posted by CAA — Jun 17, 2013
People in the News lists new hires, positions, and promotions in three sections: Academe, Museums and Galleries, and Organizations and Publications.
The section is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
June 2013
Academe
Luca Buvoli (photograph by Keke Keukelaar)Luca Buvoli, an interdisciplinary artist, has been appointed director of the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
Muriel Hasbun, chair of photography at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, has been promoted to professor at her school.
Jean RobertsonJean Robertson, an art historian and professor in the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, has been named Chancellor’s Professor, the highest academic rank at the university.
Rachel SchreiberRachel Schreiber, formerly director of humanities and sciences at California College of the Arts in Oakland and San Francisco, has become dean and vice president for academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute. She will assume her duties on July 1, 2013.
Tanya Sheehan has been promoted to associate professor in the Art History Department at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she has taught since 2008. In September 2013 she will take a new position, associate professor of American art, at Colby College in Waterville, Maine.
Museums and Galleries
Peter BarnetPeter Barnet, the Michel David-Weill Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters in New York, has been promoted to the newly created position of senior curator. His new position begins on September 1.
Connie Butler, chief curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, has been named chief curator of the Hammer Museum, part of the University of California, Los Angeles. Her new job begins in July.
C. Griffith Mann, deputy director and chief curator of the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, has been appointed Michel David-Weill Curator in Charge of the Department of Medieval Art and the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, succeeding Peter Barnet. He assumes his new position on September 1.
Ugochukwu-Smooth NzewiUgochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, a specialist in modern and contemporary African and African diaspora art, has been appointed the first curator of African art for the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Jonathan F. Walz, curator of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, has resigned in order to devote more time to a national traveling exhibition that he is cocurating, This Is a Portrait If I Say So.
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Jun 15, 2013
CAA recognizes its members for their professional achievements, be it a grant, fellowship, residency, book prize, honorary degree, or related award.
Grants, Awards, and Honors is published every two months: in February, April, June, August, October, and December. To learn more about submitting a listing, please follow the instructions on the main Member News page.
June 2013
Dora ApelDora Apel has received a Marilyn Williamson Distinguished Faculty Fellowship for 2013–14, awarded by the Humanities Center at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.
Sarah D. Beetham, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware in Newark, has received a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. Her research project is titled “Sculpting the Citizen Soldier: Reproduction and National Memory, 1865–1917.”
Leigh Behnke, an artist and lecturer at the School of Visual Arts in New York, has earned a 2013 fellowship in fine arts from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Jill E. Bugajski, a PhD student in the Department of Art History at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has accepted a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. She is researching “Totalitarian Aesthetics and the Democratic Imagination in American Art, 1933–1947.”
Mary Katherine Campbell, assistant professor of art history in the School of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has earned a 2013 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her project is called “Mormon Porn: Charles Ellis Johnson’s Stereographic Sinners and Latter-Day Saints.”
Cora Cohen, R 77, 2011, acrylic, Flashe, and tape on roentgenograph, 15⅝ x 11¾ in. (artwork © Cora Cohen)Cora Cohen, an artist based in Long Island City, New York, has received a 2013 fellowship in fine arts from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Huey Copeland, associate professor of art history at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, has been given a 2013 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. He will use the funds to work on his project, “In the Arms of the Negress: A Brief History of Modern Artistic Practice.”
Katelyn D. Crawford, a doctoral student in the McIntire Department of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, has accepted a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship to continue work on “Transient Painters, Traveling Canvases: Portraiture and Mobility in the British Atlantic, 1750–1780.”
Elise Dodeles, San Francisco Area Fighter A885 in Profile, 2012 (artwork © Elise Dodeles)Elise Dodeles has been awarded a 2013 New Jersey Individual Artist’s Fellowship for Painting from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
Klint Ericson, a doctoral student in the Art Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has earned a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. He will continue working on “Sumptuous and Beautiful, As They Were: Architectural Form, Everyday Life, and Cultural Encounter in a Seventeenth-Century New Mexico Mission.”
Coco Fusco, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has won a 2013 fellowship in film and video from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Mary D. GarrardMary D. Garrard, professor emerita of art history at American University in Washington, DC, visited the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, as Stanford Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in February 2013. While in residence, Garrard delivered the keynote address for a conference celebrating the university’s Center for the Humanities as the new publication site for Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal; she also gave another plenary session lecture for conferees.
Ann Eden GibsonAnn Eden Gibson, professor emerita of art history at the University of Delaware in Newark, has won the Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation’s Research Center Book Prize for Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1997). The triennial $5,000 prize honors the author of a significant book on some aspect of American modernism published from the mid-1980s to 2009.
Sharon Harper, an artist and associate professor of visual and environmental studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has received a 2013 fellowship in photography from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Guy Heedren, professor of art at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has won a 2013 fellowship in fine-arts research from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Laura Turner Igoe, a graduate student in art history at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has received a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. Her research project is called “The Opulent City and the Sylvan State: Art and Environmental Embodiment in Early National Philadelphia.”
Sharon IrishSharon Irish, an art and architectural historian, has been awarded a Colston Research Fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Bristol in England for spring 2014, hosted by the Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, and Television, in conjunction with the Productive Margins program. As a Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor, Irish will continue her research on the artists Stephen Willats and Suzanne Lacy, in collaboration with the Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol. Her project is entitled “In the Margins? Local Knowledge and Self-Organization.”
Susan N. Johnson-Roehr, who recently earned her PhD in architectural history from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has been named a New Faculty Fellow by the American Council of Learned Societies. She will take up a two-year position at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Tirza True LatimerTirza True Latimer, chair of the graduate program in Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, has received a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend to complete research for a book, provisionally titled Eccentric Modernisms: Making Differences in the History of American Art.
Megan R. Luke, assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and Sarah B. H. Hamill, assistant professor of art at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, have received a Collaborative Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. Their project is entitled “Sculpture and Photography: The Art Object in Reproduction.”
Lyle Massey, associate professor in the Art History Department at the University of California, Irvine, has been awarded a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She will be in residence at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena to work on her project, “Woman Inside Out: Gender, Dissection, and Representation in Early Modern Europe.”
Carrie Moyer, Hook, Line & Sinker, 2012, acrylic, graphite, and glitter on canvas, 72 x 60 in. Collection of the artist (artwork © Carrie Moyer)Carrie Moyer, an artist based in Brooklyn and associate professor of art and art history at Hunter College, City University of New York, has received a 2013 fellowship in fine arts from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Jennifer Anne Norman has completed a fall 2012 artist residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, located in New Berlin, New York.
Erin K. Pauwels, a doctoral candidate in the history of art at Indiana University in Bloomington, has received a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship. She continue working on her dissertation, “Sarony’s Living Pictures: Performance, Photography, and Gilded Age American Art.”
Naomi Ruth Pitamber, a doctoral student in art history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has earned a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. She will continue work on her research project, “Re-Placing Byzantium: Laskarid Urban Environments and the Landscape of Loss, 1204–1261.”
D. Jacob Rabinowitz, a PhD student in the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, has been awarded a 2013 Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship to continue his project, “Public Construction: Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Running Fence.”
Yael Rice, an art historian who teaches at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, has received a Rare Book School Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography to attend the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, a three-year program for early-career scholars that seeks to reinvigorate bibliographic studies in the humanities.
Conrad Rudolph, professor of medieval art history at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), has won a 2012–13 Digital Humanities Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a project, “FACES: Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems,” that he is researching with his UCR colleagues, Amit Roy-Chowdhury (electrical engineering) and Jeanette Kohl (art history).
D. Fairchild Ruggles, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, has won a 2013 fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. The award, which supports individual scholars working in the humanities and related social sciences, will sustain her project, “Shajar al-Durr: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of a Thirteenth-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen.”
Gary Schneider, an artist based in Brookhaven, New York, and assistant professor of visual arts in the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, has received a 2013 fellowship in photography from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
William Tronzo of the University of California, San Diego, and an affiliate of Università degli Studi Roma Tre has been awarded a multiyear grant from the Getty Foundation for a project he has been working on with Kimberly Bowes of the University of Pennsylvania and Mellon Professor at the American Academy in Rome. Called “Framing the Medieval Mediterranean: Museums and Archaeology in National Discourse,” the project will bring together scholars and museum professionals from North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and America to discuss their common and divergent aims, methodologies, approaches, and techniques regarding the collection and display of medieval material culture, as well as the influence of national narratives on shaping field- and institution-specific goals. The grant is part of the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, which aims to increase scholarly exchange among individuals in key international regions whose economic or political realities have prevented previous collaboration.
Edward Vazquez, assistant professor of the history of art and architecture at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont, has earned a 2013 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for his research on “Aspects: Fred Sandback’s Sculpture.”
Fotini Vurgaropulou, Red Hook Mama, 2013, steel, paint, copper, and cast resin (artwork © Fotini Vurgaropulou)Fotini Vurgaropulou, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has been commissioned by the Backyard Garden and New York’s GreenThumb program to install a 9-foot-tall mixed-media sculpture (steel, paint, copper, and cast resin) in a public garden in the neighborhood of Red Hook. The piece is on view from April 21 to August 4, 2013.
Nancy L. WickerNancy L. Wicker, professor of art history at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, has been named a recipient of a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to initiate “Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe” with a codirector, Lilla Kopár of the Catholic University and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia.
Alice Pixley Young has accepted a fellowship for a summer residency at the Jentel Artist Residency Program. She will spend the month of July living and working in Banner, Wyoming.
Gregory A. Zinman, who recently earned a doctorate in cinema studies from New York University, has been appointed by the American Council of Learned Societies as a two-year New Faculty Fellow in film at Columbia University in New York.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 12, 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.
When Artworks Crash: Restorers Face Digital Test
Paintings fade; sculptures chip. Art restorers have long known how to repair those material flaws, so the experience of looking at a Vermeer or a Rodin remains basically unchanged over time. But when creativity is computerized, the art isn’t so easy to fix. For instance, when a web-based work becomes technologically obsolete, does updated software simply restore it? Or is the piece fundamentally changed? (Read more in the New York Times.)
Crowdfunding Academic Research
When a professor from a small liberal-arts college in central Pennsylvania decided to take on a massive research project two summers ago, he went through the usual, often futile, process of applying for federal and private grants. But when funds were short a year later, he went down a nontraditional route—turning to the public and the internet for help. In fifty days, Juniata College’s Chris Grant and his research partner, Gina Lamendella, raised $10,800 through a crowdfunding website called iAMscientist. (Read more in Insider Higher Ed.)
Self-Sabotage in the Academic Career
Pogo recognized long ago that we often are our own worst enemies. Sure, he was a cartoon character, but he had a point—especially in higher education, where self-sabotage seems to be a standard characteristic of academic careers. In my thirty years as a professor, five years as a dean, and three years as a provost, I have observed many academics harm their own careers, often without realizing it. Here are fifteen ways in which you can be most self-destructive. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Help Desk: Curating Like a Fool
I’m an artist and art writer and would like to complete the trifecta by seriously trying to curate. However, since I’ve only been on the curated side of the table, I know embarrassingly little about the nitty-gritty of it. For example, when I have a proposal ready, do I inform the proposed artists of my intentions before or after I submit the proposal? Who arranges and pays for shipping work? I only know how I’ve personally been treated and not what is typical. I’m too afraid of looking like a fool to give it a shot. (Read more in Daily Serving.)
“Stuff Matters”: The Crucial Work of the AIC’s Collections Emergency Response Team
The Collections Emergency Response Team, says Eric Pourchot, institutional advancement director at the Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation, “came out of the experience we had after Hurricane Katrina, as many of our members from AIC had served on teams that went down to the New Orleans and Gulf Coast area to help cultural institutions recover as best they could from that disaster.” (Read more in Can You Dig It?.)
Are Video Games the Next Great Art Form?
In 2005, the late film critic Roger Ebert created a storm of controversy when he wrote that video games could never be art. While Ebert wasn’t the first person to address the subject, he was one of the first mainstream critics to do so, and his statement set off a rash of essays, blog posts, and talks arguing for (few) and against (many) his position. The subject has drifted in and out of popular culture ever since, with different scholars weighing in here and there. Recently, a number of museums, including the Smithsonian and MoMA, staged exhibitions featuring video games as art, throwing the topic into focus again. (Read more in Pacific Standard.)
Experimenting with Facebook in the College Classroom
While discussing the nuances of regression analysis, I saw some of my students smiling. It wasn’t a smile of understanding; it was a response to seeing a Facebook comment on their smart phone. I later learned that 99 percent of the students in the research method class were Facebook users, routinely checking for updates ten to twenty times a day. The next semester, I decided to embrace social media and created a Facebook page for the class, which was comprised of twenty-five students. It was actually fun and easy. In less than two hours, I had created a page with relevant material for the course. (Read more in Faculty Focus.)
The Deduction for Charitable Contributions: The Sacred Cow of the Tax Code?
In his most recent budget proposal, President Barack Obama seeks to impose a cap on itemized deductions in the personal income tax return—which includes the deduction for charitable contributions. This provision, part of the administration’s strategy to raise revenue to pay for government spending, has been a part of every White House budget proposal since 2009, and every year arts advocacy organizations join the rest of the nonprofit sector in opposing the changes. So far, the cap has been successfully warded off, but there’s growing concern that if Republicans and Democrats ever agree on sweeping tax reforms, the charitable deduction will be on the chopping block. (Read more in Createquity.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Jun 05, 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 Exit Interview: Frank Goodyear and Anne Collins Goodyear
They did not arrive at the Smithsonian together, but Frank H. Goodyear III and Anne Collins Goodyear, longtime curators at the National Portrait Gallery, are leaving it as a pair. After twelve years at the museum, this husband-and-wife team will begin their tenure as codirectors of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine, in June. (Read more in the Washington Post.)
Detroit Museum Not the First to Consider Selling Out
Museums sell works all the time but typically not their best stuff. When they do sell, it’s to get rid of pieces that don’t suit the collection. They use the money to buy new works that are a better fit. They’re not supposed to use the money to buy computers or pay down debt, according to industry standards. But when museums aren’t freestanding institutions, as is the case in Detroit, the larger entities that control them sometimes can’t help but see dollar signs. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
A Step in the Wrong Direction—or False Advertising?
What comes after crowd sourcing and crowd funding? Crowd deaccessioning, of course. Yup, the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens has opened an exhibition of five paintings from its collection by the French artist Bernard Smol (1897–1969). The museum wants to keep just one of them because of “limited storage space and evolving collecting philosophy.” (Read more in Real Clear Arts.)
“You Become Better with Age”
At what age do people hit their stride professionally? Categorically speaking, athletes, engineers, politicians, television writers, salesmen, and actresses all have varying norms and shelf lives, sometimes affected by physical attributes or societal expectations. Seemingly immune to ageist perceptions and traditional notions of retirement are artists. A historical look reveals that a striking number have been highly productive and turned out some of their best work late into old age, including Bellini, Michelangelo, Titian, Ingres, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, O’Keeffe, and Bourgeois. (Read more in ARTnews.)
Best Practices for Live Tweeting
I often live tweet the conferences and events I attend. For example, I was involved with the Twitter discussion while at the Linked Ancient World Data Institute, which led to great conversations with people who weren’t able to attend and allowed for continued engagement among the participants. However, there were times when people asked that information not be shared or that links not be posted—and this information was respected. Overall, though, live tweeting was a major boon to the event. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
The Modern Writing-School Paradox: More Students, Fewer Jobs, More Glory
Never before have there been so many teachers telling so many students how to write. However meager the money, teaching is a paying gig and a subsidized education. The students, though, are a mystery. The number of traditional MFA programs, undergraduate writing programs, nontraditional low-residency writing programs, online writing courses, weekend writing workshops, summer writing conferences, writers’ colony retreats, private-instruction classes, and how-to-write books, blogs, and software programs has grown so colossally you’d think there is as much demand for new writers in the marketplace as there is for mobile-app designers. You’d be wrong. (Read more in the Atlantic.)
A Pollock Restored, a Mystery Revealed
Jackson Pollock’s process and his canvases have been so extensively studied that it would seem there could be nothing else to learn. Yet a ten-month examination and restoration of his One: Number 31, 1950, by conservators at the Museum of Modern Art, have produced new insights about how the artist worked. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Art Detective Warns of Missing Checks That Let Stolen Works Go Undiscovered
European auction houses, dealers, and collectors are failing to make adequate checks to avoid handling stolen artworks, an art lawyer has warned after recovering from an Italian auction an old-master painting taken from its British owner in a burglary more than thirty years ago. Christopher A. Marinello, who specializes in recovering stolen art and resolving title disputes, said: “We do find a lot of stolen and looted artwork in civil-law countries such as Italy, France, and Germany. Consigners of tainted works of art often try to hide behind the good-faith purchase laws of these countries while performing little or no due diligence.” (Read more in the Guardian.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 29, 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.
DIA’s Art Collection Could Face Sell-Off to Satisfy Detroit’s Creditors
The once unthinkable is suddenly thinkable. Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr is considering whether the multibillion-dollar collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts should be considered city assets that potentially could be sold to cover about $15 billion in debt. How much is the art at the DIA worth? Nobody knows exactly, but several billion dollars might well be a low estimate. (Read more in the Detroit Free Press.)
AAMD Statement on Detroit Institute of Arts Collection
A museum’s collection is held in public trust for current and future generations. This is a bedrock principle of the Association of Art Museum Directors and of the museum field as a whole. Art collections are vitally important cultural and educational resources that should never be treated as disposable assets to be liquidated, even in times of economic distress. (Read more from the Association of Art Museum Directors.)
Painting via “Power of Thought” May Hold Some Promise
An Austrian-based company called G-Tech Medical Engineering has developed software that allows people to “paint” on a computer through the “power of thought,” reports the Telegraph science correspondent Richard Gray. As Gray notes, the tool—which researchers are hoping to develop to the point that it can be a chip implanted in the brain—can help patients with progressive brain diseases. But there’s an aspect to art making that may be lost in translation. (Read more in the Houston Chronicle.)
Your Thievin’ Art? At Play in the Field of Fair Use
Julie Saul recently opened a show of work by Arne Svenson, an artist with a telephoto lens, a formalist’s eye, and a somewhat unsettling obsession with his neighbors in the glass-walled apartment building across the street. You can meet them, too, in the color pictures in The Neighbors. Assuming that they really are neighbors—and not conjured in the studio or on the computer—the work falls into one of those gray areas of fair use, the legal doctrine that allows artists to use images of or by others under certain circumstances. (Read more in ARTnews.)
Masterworks for One and All
Many museums post their collections online, but the Rijksmuseum has taken the unusual step of offering downloads of high-resolution images at no cost, encouraging the public to copy and transform its artworks into stationery, t-shirts, tattoos, plates, or even toilet paper. The museum, whose collection includes masterpieces by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Mondrian, and van Gogh, has already made images of 125,000 of its works available through Rijksstudio, an interactive section of its website. The goal is to add 40,000 images a year until the entire collection of one million artworks spanning eight centuries is available. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Thousands of Cave Paintings Have Been Discovered in Mexico
Archaeologists have uncovered nearly five thousand cave paintings at eleven different sites in Mexico, the likely product of early hunter-gatherers. What’s even more remarkable is that the area was previously thought to be uninhabited. The discovery was made in the northeastern region of Burgos in the San Carlos mountain range of Tamaulipas. The archaeologist Martha García Sánchez, who works at the Mexican National Institute of Anthropology and History, recently presented these findings at the Historic Archaeology meeting held in Mexico’s National History Museum. (Read more from io9 and BBC News).
Help Desk: Death and Taxes (Mostly Taxes)
I have recently been the lucky recipient of an unprecedented amount of small, but not insubstantial, payments. Some are for arts writing and editing, others are one-time grants, art sales, and various art-world-related odd jobs. All earnings have been issued through W-9s and will show up as 1099-MISC income. None of it has been taxed. I understand that I should set aside a portion of these funds for the state and feds, but where do I start? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Rejection and Its Discontents
The probability that a researcher will have a grant proposal rejected nowadays is about 1. In the current climate, in which grant agencies and foundations are receiving more proposals than ever before even as their budgets stagnate or shrink, the last few remaining decimal places of uncertainty are rapidly disappearing. It is natural to feel disappointed, angry, hurt, and frustrated when a rejection notice arrives, and it’s OK to give in to those feelings—in private, anyway. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
An Open Letter to: Mr. Kevyn Orr, Emergency Manager, City of Detroit
posted by Linda Downs — May 28, 2013
An Open Letter to:
Mr. Kevyn Orr, Emergency Manager
City of Detroit
2 Woodward Avenue
Detroit, Michigan 48226
Dear Mr. Orr:
On behalf of the College Art Association that represents over 14,000 art historians, artists, curators, art educators and art conservators we express our shock and concern upon reading The Detroit Free Press article today, “DIA’s Collection Could Face Sell-Off to Satisfy Detroit’s Creditors.”
The Detroit Institute of Arts is one of the greatest art museums in the country that represents the finest creative achievements throughout the history of the world. The DIA is not only a great treasure but one of the very few places in Detroit where all people can enjoy, contemplate and study art and its many related concepts. The DIA has developed itself as a public educational institution and has been a leader in the profession at engaging with all segments of the community.
The CAA adheres to the principle that public art museums are held in the public trust and as such are to be protected for the public good. It also supports the Alliance of Museums Code of Ethics and the Association of Art Museum Directors’ Policy on Deaccessioning that states that the sale of art museum collections to support operating expenses is unethical.
We appeal to your higher judgment in assessing the true value of the DIA and its critical role for the public good of the city, state and the country in deliberating on the future of this great collection.
Sincerely yours,
Anne Collins Goodyear
President
Linda Downs
Executive Director
August Update
On August 26, 2013, the Executive Committee of the CAA Board of Directors has agreed to promote this petition, initiated by Jeffrey Hamburger of Harvard University, regarding the potential sale of the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.
Promoting Creativity and Public Access to the Arts
posted by Linda Downs — May 23, 2013
The following document, called “Promoting Creativity and Public Access to the Arts,” contains talking points to help American citizens to advocate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
National Endowment for the Arts: Promoting Creativity and Public Access to the Arts
We urge Congress to support a budget of $155 million for the NEA in the fiscal year 2014 (FY 2014) Interior Appropriations bill to preserve citizen access to the cultural, educational, and economic benefits of the arts and to advance creativity and innovation in communities across the United States.
NEA Annual Appropriations, FY 1992 to present (in millions of dollars)
|
FY |
’92 |
’93 |
’94 |
’95 |
’96/’97 |
’98/’99 |
’00 |
’01 |
’02 |
’03 |
’04 |
’05 |
’06/’07 |
’08 |
’09 |
’10 |
’11 |
’12 |
’13 |
|
$ |
176 |
174.5 |
170.2 |
162.3 |
99.5 |
98 |
97.6 |
104.8 |
115.2 |
115.7 |
121 |
121.3 |
124.4 |
144.7 |
155 |
167.5 |
155 |
146 |
138.4* |
* FY13 reflects a 5 percent cut mandated by sequestration, applied to the CR budget from FY12. The figures above are not adjusted for inflation. (Source: NEA)
Talking Points
The NEA budget has been reduced in previous years to a level that threatens the agency’s ability to make grants in every congressional district.
- Due to recent congressional budget cuts, the NEA had to decrease funding to state arts agencies and cut more than 175 direct grants to arts organizations
- Restoring the NEA to $155 million will help maintain grant support to arts organizations and partnerships in communities across the country
The NEA contributes to the economic growth and development of communities nationwide.
- The arts put people to work. More than 905,000 US businesses are involved in the creation or distribution of the arts, employing 3.35 million people: visual artists, performing artists, managers, marketers, technicians, teachers, designers, carpenters, and a variety of other trades and professions—jobs that pay mortgages and send children to college. Artists are a larger workforce group than the legal profession, medical doctors, or agricultural workers. (Sources: Americans for the Arts, Creative Industries, 2012; NEA, Artists in the Workforce, 2008)
- The arts are a business magnet. A strong arts sector stimulates business activity, attracting companies that want to offer employees and clients a creative climate and a community with high amenity value. The arts are a successful strategy for revitalizing rural areas and inner cities. Arts organizations purchase goods and services that help local merchants thrive. Arts organizations spend money—more than $61 billion—on salaries, local products, and professional and skilled trade services that boost local economies. (Source: Americans for the Arts, Arts and Economic Prosperity IV (AEPIV) study, 2012). In 2013, the American creative sector will be measured by the federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The BEA and NEA will develop an “Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account,” which will identify and calculate the arts and culture sector’s contributions to the gross domestic product (GDP)
- The arts help communities prosper in a diversified twenty-first-century economy. Nonprofit arts organizations, along with creative enterprises, contribute to state and local economies, generating employment and tax revenues and providing goods and services demanded by the public. The nonprofit arts industry generates $135.2 billion annually in economic activity, supports 4.13 million full-time equivalent jobs in the arts and related industries, and returns $9.59 billion in federal income taxes. (Source: AEPIV study)
- The arts attract tourism revenue. Cultural tourism accounts for 78 percent of US travelers—some 118 million tourists—who include arts and heritage in their trips each year. They stay longer and spend 36 percent more money than other kinds of travelers do, contributing more than $192 billion annually to the US economy. (Source: US Cultural and Heritage Tourism Marketing Council, US Department of Commerce, Cultural and Heritage Traveler Research, 2009)
- Federal funding for the arts leverages private funding. The NEA requires at least a one-to-one match of federal funds from all grant recipients—a match far exceeded by most grantees. On average, each NEA grant leverages at least $8 from other state, local, and private sources. Private support cannot match the leveraging role of government cultural funding
Talking Points (Continued)
The NEA improves access to the arts; supports artistic excellence; and fosters lifelong learning in the arts through grants, partnerships, research, and national initiatives.
- NEA funds spread across the country and expand arts access. Every US congressional district benefits from an NEA grant, leveraging additional support from a diverse range of private sources to combine funding from government, business, foundation, and individual donors. The NEA awarded more than 2,200 grants in 2012, totaling more than $108 million in appropriated funds. A listing of these grants is online at www.AmericansForTheArts.org/go/NEAgrants
- State arts agencies extend the reach of federal arts dollars. Forty percent of all NEA program funds—approximately $46 million in FY 2013—are regranted through state arts agencies. In partnership with the NEA, state arts agencies awarded more than 22,000 grants to organizations, schools, and artists in 5,000 communities across the US (Source: National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Summary Report: 2011 Funding and Grant Making, 2011)
- NEA grants support a range of educational projects. Arts education in school and participation in arts lessons are the most significant predictors of arts participation later in life. The NEA funds school- and community-based programs that help children and youth acquire knowledge and skills in the arts. The NEA also supports educational programs for adults, collaborations between state arts agencies and state education agencies, and partnerships between arts institutions and K–12 and college/university educators. (Source: NEA, Arts Education in America: What the Declines Mean for Arts Participation, 2011)
- Rural and underserved communities benefit from the Challenge America Fast-Track category, which offers support to small and midsized organizations for projects that extend the reach of the arts to populations whose opportunities to experience the arts are limited by geography, ethnicity, economics, or disability. The Lawton Philharmonic Orchestra in Lawton, Oklahoma, for instance, received funding for an original work paying tribute to Native American themes in a concert that drew 250 Native American guests from the surrounding tribal nations
- The NEA has supported military families by partnering with Blue Star Families to present Blue Star Museums, offering free admission to active-duty military and their families, and a similar effort to launch Blue Star Theatres. Other NEA programs for the military have included Operation Homecoming; Great American Voices Military Base Tour; and Shakespeare in American Communities Military Base Tour.
- When public arts funding is lost, private dollars do not reliably pick up the slack. Tough economic conditions mean less revenue from public, private, and corporate sources. Loss of support to arts organizations across the country during the recent recession has meant cuts in administrative costs and cuts to programs. Programs for lower‐income populations and at‐risk children are typically hit hard because a larger majority of their funding comes from public sources
Background
America’s arts infrastructure, supported by a combination of government, business, foundation, and individual donors, is critical to the nation’s well-being and economic vitality. In a striking example of federal/state partnership, the NEA distributes 40 percent of its program dollars to state arts agencies, with each state devoting its own appropriated funds to support arts programs throughout the state. This partnership ensures that each state has a stable source of arts funding and policy. These grants, combined with state legislative appropriations and other dollars, are distributed widely to strengthen arts infrastructures and ensure broad access to the arts.
For close to fifty years, the NEA has provided strategic leadership and investment in the arts through its core programs, including those for dance, design, folk and traditional arts, literature, local arts agencies, media arts, multidisciplinary arts, music, theater, visual arts, and other programs. Among the proudest accomplishments of the NEA is the growth of arts activity in areas of the nation that were previously underserved or not served at all, especially in rural and inner-city communities. Americans can now see professional productions and exhibitions of high quality in their own hometowns.
The FY 2013 NEA appropriation reflects a 5 percent cut mandated by sequestration, applied to the continuing resolution budget allocation of $146 million from FY 2012, despite the president requesting an increase to $154.3 million and the Senate Appropriations Committee proposing an equal amount. The administration’s FY 2014 budget proposes $154.466 million for the NEA, which would nearly restore the agency to FY 2011 funding levels and would provide support to a healthy nonprofit arts sector in communities nationwide. Current funding amounts to just 47 cents per capita, as compared to 70 cents per capita in 1992.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — May 08, 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.
Long Hidden, Vatican Painting Linked to Native Americans
For close to four hundred years, the painting was closed off to the world. For the past 124 years, millions of visitors walked by without noticing an intriguing scene covered with centuries of grime. Only now, the Vatican says a detail in a newly cleaned fifteenth-century fresco shows what may be one of the first European depictions of Native Americans. The fresco, The Resurrection, was painted by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio in 1494—just two years after Christopher Columbus first set foot in what came to be called the New World. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
Ten Tips to Earn Tenure
I had complained to my colleague that after the intellectually, emotionally, and physically grueling experience of completing graduate school while teaching full-time, I would really look forward to “just” being a professor. She replied, “I hate to tell you this, but you’ll still be working sixty- and seventy-hour weeks to earn tenure and promotion because you’ll have all kinds of other responsibilities besides teaching that you don’t have now.” Over twelve years, three moves, and two blood pressure medicines later, I see how right she was that day. Here are my ten tips for earning tenure and promotion without becoming the nutty professor. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
As Works Flood In, Nation’s Library Treads Water
The Sea Creatures, who recently sent their recording Naked in the Rain to the Library of Congress, probably did not ponder the impact of sequestration on their music’s journey from dream to copyright. Just as military contractors, air-traffic controllers, and federal workers are coping with the grim results of a partisan impasse over the federal deficit, the Library of Congress, whose services range from copyrighting written works to the collection, preservation, and digitalization of millions of books, photographs, maps, and other materials, faces deep cuts that threaten its historic mission. (Read more in the New York Times.)
Q&A with Denise Scott Brown
Denise Scott Brown, the cofounder of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates (now VSBA), talks to Architect about a petition to put her name on the 1991 Pritzer Architecture Prize, about her career in design. and about the ways she has been treated as a woman architect in a profession that she has described as a “nineteenth-century upper-middle-class men’s club.” (Read more in Architect.)
Smithsonian Sequestration Closures Could Get Worse
The Smithsonian Institution has announced that parts of three museums—the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of African Art, and the Smithsonian Castle—will close through September 30 because of mandatory budget cuts, but the true effect of sequestration on the museum group is far wider. A Smithsonian spokeswoman says that in addition to these closures, sections of other museums will go dark this year as exhibitions come to their scheduled ends. (Read more in the DCist.)
English Teachers Reject Use of Robots to Grade Student Writing
Critics of standardized tests argue that the written portion of those assessments can short-circuit the process of developing ideas in writing. Using machines to grade those tests further magnifies their negative effects, according to a statement adopted last month by the National Council of Teachers of English. As high-school students prepare for college, the statement reads, they “are ill served when their writing experience has been dictated by tests that ignore the evermore complex and varied types and uses of writing found in higher education.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)