CAA News Today
NEH Chairman Jim Leach Announces Resignation
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 23, 2013
Jim Leach announced today that he is leaving his post as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). His resignation is effective the first week of May.
“I am grateful for the opportunity to have become associated with an agency that plays such a critical role in humanities research and public programming,” he said. “America needs an infrastructure of ideas as well as bridges, and no institution over the past half century has done more to strengthen the idea base of our democracy than the NEH. The humanities are an essential corollary to the nation’s increasing focus on science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).”
Under Leach’s leadership, the agency created a Bridging Cultures program designed to promote understanding and mutual respect for diverse groups within the United States and abroad. As part of this effort, the NEH supported programs designed to expand citizen understanding of American history and values, the civil rights movement, and foreign cultures.
In addition, the agency helped launch a National Digital Public Library to establish a unified gateway to digital collections of books, artworks, and artifacts from libraries, museums, and other cultural sites across the country. He presided over the culmination of decades-long projects such as the publication of the Autobiography of Mark Twain and the Dictionary of American Regional English.
Leach is the ninth NEH chairman. Prior to being named to the post in August 2009, he was a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and interim director of the Institute of Politics and lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. From 1977 to 2007, he represented Iowa in the House of Representatives, where he chaired the Banking and Financial Services Committee, the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
Carole Watson, NEH deputy chairman, will be the acting head of the endowment until a permanent replacement is nominated by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate.
Image: Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (photograph by Greg Powers and Audrey Crewe)
Grants, Awards, and Honors
posted by CAA — Apr 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.
April 2013
Nicole Awai, an artist who lives and works in New York, has been awarded a 2012 grant from the Art Matters Foundation to support travel to La Brea Pitch Lake in Trinidad.
Conrad Bakker, an artist based in Urbana, Illinois, has received a $25,000 grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation through its 2012 Painters and Sculptors Grant Program.
Mary Bergstein, professor of history of art and visual culture at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, has received the 2012 Courage to Dream Book Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association for her book Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). The prize is awarded to the book that best promotes the integration of the academic and clinical worlds of psychoanalysis.
Michele Brody, an artist based in New York, has received a commission to create a site-specific outdoor installation for the 2013 Cheng Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Project in Taiwan.
Mara De Luca, an artist from Los Angeles, California, was awarded a residency at the Irvine Fine Arts Center in Irvine, California, where she created a series of prints, using intaglio and silkscreen processes, related to her current work in painting.
Jeffrey Gibson, an artist based in Hudson, New York, has received a $25,000 grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation through its 2012 Painters and Sculptors Grant Program.
Harris Fogel, associate professor and director of the photography program in the College of Art, Media, and Design at University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, received support from the US embassy to visit Łódź, Poland, where he was a visiting expert, lecturer, and portfolio reviewer for the 2012 Fotofestiwal, an international festival of photography.
Shelley GazinShelley Gazin has received support from numerous organizations for her contribution to the exhibition Light and Shadows: The Story of Iranian Jews, held in 2012–13 at the Fowler Museum on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Gazin accepted a California Documentary Project Grant from the California Council for the Humanities; subsidies from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Righteous Persons Foundation; and a research fellowship from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Additional funding came from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the Center for Iranian Creativity, the Durfee Foundation, and the Dortort Center for Creativity in the Arts at UCLA Hillel, in collaboration with the Iranian Jewish Women’s Organization of Southern California.
Kate Gilmore, an artist working in performance and video, has accepted a 2012 grant from the Art Matters Foundation to support ongoing work.
Janet Goldner was awarded a Fulbright Senior Specialist Grant for travel to Harare, Zimbabwe, to conduct a workshop and develop a collaborative project with young Zimbabwean artists. She also delivered several lectures and talks during her time there (October–November 2012).
June HargroveJune Hargrove, a professor of nineteenth-century art in the Department of Art and Archaeology at the University of Maryland in College Park, has been awarded a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres from the French government for scholarship that has contributed to knowledge about French art and culture.
Micol Hebron, an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California, was an artist in residence on Chloë Flores’s Facebook page for December 2012. Hebron ran four ongoing projects during the month.
Natalie Jeremijenko, an artist and engineer based in New York, has accepted a 2013 Project Grant from Creative Capital in the Emerging Fields category.
Vishal Jugdeo has accepted a 2012 grant from the Art Matters Foundation to support a video project in Kolkata, India, involving the port of departure, globalization, and tolerance of marginal sexualities.
Tony Labat, an artist who works in performance, video, sculpture, and installation, has been selected as one of ten recipients of the Artadia Awards 2013 San Francisco. Awards are bestowed upon visual artists in all media and at any stage of their career who live and work in the five-county Bay area.
June HargroveAnder Mikalson, an artist based in Sunnyside, New York, has received a 2012 grant from the Art Matters Foundation to support ongoing work.
Vesna Pavlović, assistant professor of art at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, has accepted a 2012 grant from the Art Matters Foundation to support ongoing work.
Lisi Raskin, an artist based in Brooklyn, New York, has been named a recipient of Creative Time’s 2012–13 Global Residency Program, which offers opportunities for artists to address important social issues through immersion in communities around the world. Raskin will travel to Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Gregory Sale, an artist based in Phoenix, Arizona, has accepted a 2013 Project Grant from Creative Capital in the Emerging Fields category.
Will Wilson has received a 2012 grant from the Art Matters Foundation to support Towards a Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange, a project inviting indigenous artists, arts professionals, and tribal governance to engage in the performative ritual that is the studio portrait.
Books Published by CAA Members
posted by CAA — Apr 15, 2013
Publishing a book is a major milestone for artists and scholars—browse a list of recent titles below.
Books Published by CAA Members appears 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.
April 2013
Thea Burns. The Luminous Trace: Drawing and Writing in Metalpoint (London: Archetype Publications, 2012).
Michael Ann Holly. The Melancholy Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).
Sharon Louden, ed. Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2013).
Joanne Pillsbury, ed. Past Presented: Archaeological Illustration and the Ancient Americas (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2012).
Anna K. Tuck-Scala. Andrea Vaccaro (Naples, 1604–1670): His Documented Life and Art (Naples, Italy: Paparo Edizioni, 2012).
March 2013 Issue of The Art Bulletin Published
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 04, 2013
The March 2013 issue of The Art Bulletin, the leading publication of international art-historical scholarship, launches the celebration of its centennial year. Gracing the cover is a photograph by the artist Martha Rosler that depicts the installation of her traveling library at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris in 2007. Karen Lang, the journal’s editor-in-chief, writes of this image: “These days … it remains unclear whether a ‘library user’ would hunker down with a book or nestle in for a session on a laptop…. Rosler invites us to consider how we interact with books. Her artwork makes us conscious of this activity and of the status of the book itself.”
In a brief essay, Craig Clunas ponders the conditions of seeing and description in “Regarding Art and Art History.” This issue’s “Notes from the Field” features short essays on the topic of materiality by Rosler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Natasha Eaton, Michael Ann Holly, Amelia Jones, Michael Kelly, Robin Kelsey, Alisa LaGamma, Monika Wagner, Oliver Watson, and Tristan Weddigen. The March interview brings Svetlana Alpers, professor emerita of history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, into conversation with her fellow scholar Stephen Melville.
In the opening essay, “Meaningful Spectacles: Gothic Ivories Staging the Divine,” Sarah M. Guérin uncovers the strategic use of microarchitectural frames in sacred ivory carvings of thirteenth-century Western Europe. Next, in the evocatively titled “Ingres’s Shadows,” Sarah Betzer demonstrates how the nineteenth-century French artist’s depictions of ancient sculpture for the publication Museé français relate to philosophical considerations of sensory experience, revealing the distinctly modern terms of its allure for the artist.
Paul Smith examines the perspectival distortions in Paul Cézanne’s paintings and the political implications of his repudiation of perspective, that is, the rejection of spectacle as the normative form of visual experience in modern life. Yi Gu’s essay “What’s in a Name?” studies the appellations of photography that circulated in China between 1840 and 1911 to trace the emergence of a new understanding of visual truth in Chinese art. Finally, Leora Maltz-Leca explores relations between William Kentridge’s ambulatory animation process and local imagery of striding figures as allegories of political regime change in South Africa.
The books under review in this issue represent a broad cross-section of art-historical scholarship. Robert H. Sharf examines Secrets of the Sacred: Empowering Buddhist Images in Clear, in Code, and in Cache, a collection of lectures delivered by the late scholar Helmut Brinker at the Spencer Museum of Art. An-Yi Pan assesses The Night Banquet: A Chinese Scroll through Time by De-nin D. Lee, the first book-length study on a well-known handscroll, and Leo G. Mazow evaluates Elizabeth Hutchinson’s The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturalism in American Art, 1890–1915. John Ott’s review considers three recent books on race and art: Kirsten Pai Buick’s Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject; Renée Ater’s Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller; and Jacqueline Francis’s Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America.
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 June 2013, will feature essays on, among other topics, institutional art history in the mid-twentieth century through the lens of H. W. Janson’s classic survey text History of Art.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Apr 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.
ARTstor to Help Launch the Digital Public Library of America
ARTstor is partnering with the Digital Public Library of America to provide access to more than ten thousand high-quality images from six leading museums. In addition to linking to the original contributing museum’s own website, each DPLA record will link to the image in Open ARTstor, a new ARTstor initiative that allows users to view and download large versions of public-domain images. (Read more from the Digital Public Library of America.)
The Etiquette of Accepting a Job Offer
The academic job market is overcrowded, but departments are hiring, and each year thousands of graduate students and other candidates will get phone calls offering them tenure-track positions. It is typically a moment of mutual giddiness. The department heads are excited at the prospect of a terrific new colleague; the job applicants now know that their immediate future is assured. Then, well, complications may ensue. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Help Desk: Juried Shows
I am a painter who recently graduated from art school but haven’t had much gallery experience, and I was interested in submitting work to some juried shows as a way of gaining some experience and making some new connections. Could you offer some advice on finding reputable juried shows to apply to? (Read more at Daily Serving.)
Having “The Talk”
Anyone considering joining the alt-ac job market will eventually tell his or her academic colleagues that he or she might be jumping off the tenure-track train. For graduate students this will often mean having “the talk” with their advisers. There are several reasons why it is important to seek your adviser’s support, even for an alt-ac career. (Read more at Inside Higher Ed.)
How Can We Reimagine Arts Schools?
Perhaps what was most thrilling and unexpected about the meeting of 250 arts leaders at the “3 Million Stories” conference was an emerging sense of urgency and excitement about the need to think seriously about how arts schools and training institutions—especially at the collegiate level—might reimagine themselves and respond to changes in how creative work is done and the nature of creative careers. In short, who will invent the twenty-first-century arts school? (Read more at Barry’s Blog.)
STEM and Liberal Arts: Frenemies of the State
When I was getting ready for college, I knew I was going to pursue a degree in some area of science; I never even considered a liberal-arts degree. To be honest, I did my best to not take any liberal-arts courses I didn’t need to. These classes were at odds with my science, and I didn’t want to waste my time on something I wasn’t going to use. (Read more at Plos.)
Sotheby’s Controversial Sale of Precolumbian Artifacts Yields Low Sales Figures and Highlights the Increased Efforts of Countries to Repatriate Artifacts
Last week’s sale of Precolumbian artifacts predominantly from the Barbier-Mueller collection, conducted at Sotheby’s in Paris, proved an anticlimactic end to a controversial story. Though estimated to bring in $19 to 23 million, the sale only made $13.3 million, and 165 of the 313 lots were unsold. An unwelcome spotlight had been fixed on the sale, as four countries—Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Costa Rica—demanded return of artifacts that were allegedly stolen from their borders decades before. (Read more at the Center for Art Law.)
Managing Your Online Time
Over the course of a teaching day, most faculty members find themselves on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, Blackboard (or its competitors), blogs, and email. We manage a steady stream of online demands. Yet one of the most frequent complaints from students is that their instructors have “no online presence.” (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
CAA Seeks Nominations for the 2014 Awards for Distinction
posted by Lauren Stark — Apr 02, 2013
CAA has begun accepting nominations for the 2014 Awards for Distinction. Please review the guidelines below to become familiar with the nomination process and to download, complete, and submit the requested materials.
CAA will name the recipients of the 2014 awards in January and honor them in a special ceremony during Convocation at the 102nd Annual Conference in Chicago.
General Guidelines
In your letter, state who you are; how you know (of) the nominee; how the nominee and/or his or her work or publication has affected your practice or studies and the pursuit of your career; and why you think this person (or, in a collaboration, these people) deserves to be recognized. We also urge you to contact up to five colleagues, students, peers, collaborators, and/or coworkers of the nominee to write letters; no more than five letters are considered. Letters of support are important for reference, but the awards decisions are the responsibilities of the juries based on their expert assessment of the qualifications of the nominees.
Nominations for book and exhibition awards should be for authors of books published or works exhibited or staged between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013. Books published posthumously are not eligible. Letters of support are not required for the Morey and Barr awards. All submissions must include a completed 2014 nomination form and one copy of the nominee’s CV (limit: two pages); book-award nominations do not require a CV (see below for the appropriate forms for the Morey and Barr awards and the Porter Prize).
Please send all materials by mail or email to: Lauren Stark, 2014 Awards for Distinction, College Art Association, 50 Broadway, 21st Floor, New York, NY 10004. Deadline: July 31, 2013, for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Awards; August 31, 2013, for all others.
Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the deadline of July 31, 2013. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than five titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and caa.reviews field editors
- Publishers may not submit the same title for the Morey and Barr awards. The Morey jury does not accept exhibition catalogues
- Eligible books must have been published between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book by July 31, 2013. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs
- Complete and submit the Morey nominaton form
- Letters of support are not required
Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award
To give the jury full opportunity to evaluate each submission fairly, submit materials well before the deadline of July 31, 2013. Please review the following nomination guidelines:
- A publisher may submit no more than five titles. In addition, CAA accepts nominations from its membership, jury members, reviews editors for The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, and caa.reviews field editors
- Publishers may not submit the same title for the Morey and Barr awards. The Morey jury does not accept exhibition catalogues
- Eligible books must have been published between September 1, 2012, and August 31, 2013
- Books published posthumously are not eligible
- CAA and each jury member must receive a copy of the nominated book by July 31, 2013. A total of six copies of the book must be sent. To receive the mailing addresses for the jury, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs
- Complete and submit the Barr nomination form
- Letters of support are not required
Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize
To determine eligibility, authors of articles in The Art Bulletin must complete the Porter nomination form.
Frank Jewett Mather Award
Please submit copies of critical writings, which may be website links and printouts, photocopies or scanned pages of newspapers or magazines, and more. If the writing is contained in a single volume (such as a book), please provide the publication information.
Distinguished Teaching of Art and Art History Awards
Letters for these two awards are particularly important for the juries because of the personal contact involved in successful teaching.
Contact
Please write to Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, for more information about the nomination process.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 27, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Outside the Citadel, Social Practice Art Is Intended to Nurture
In Detroit a contemporary-art museum is completing a monument to an influential artist that will not feature his work but will instead provide food, haircuts, education programs, and other social services to the general public. In New York an art organization that commissions public installations has been dispatching a journalist to politically precarious places around the world where she enlists artists and activists—often one and the same—to write for a website that can read more like a policy journal than an art portal. And in St. Louis an art institution known primarily for its monumental Richard Serra sculpture is turning itself into a hub of social activism. If none of these projects sounds much like art, that is precisely the point. (Read more in the New York Times.)
The Troubling Dean-to-Professor Ratio
J. Paul Robinson, chairman of the Purdue University faculty senate, walks the halls of a ten-story tower, pointing out a row of offices for administrators. “I have no idea what these people do,” says the biomedical engineering professor. Purdue has a $313,000-a-year acting provost and six vice and associate vice provosts, including a $198,000-a-year chief diversity officer. Among its sixteen deans and eleven vice presidents are a $253,000 marketing officer and a $433,000 business school chief. The average full professor at the public university in West Lafayette, Indiana, makes $125,000. The number of Purdue administrators has jumped 54 percent in the past decade—almost eight times the growth rate of tenured and tenure-track faculty. (Read more in Business Week.)
Let’s Do Lunch
In master’s programs, and especially at the doctoral level, graduate students depend on their advisers more than on anyone else in their careers. Students do more work for their adviser’s eyes than for anyone else’s, and the adviser’s approval is the key to the door that leads to the next place, whether full-time employment or more school. So an adviser’s criticism of a graduate student’s work can pierce deeper than the tiny hooks on a burr. And the adviser may not know it. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
The Gallery’s Glass Ceiling: Sexism Persists in the German Art World
The art world is typically seen as open and progressive, even radical. But artists and curators in Germany say that, despite slow progress, the art scene is still plagued by widespread sexism and a conservative, macho culture. (Read more in Spiegel Online.)
The Chapman Brothers on Life as Artists’ Assistants
“It was hard labor by any measure,” says Jake Chapman, recalling his and brother Dinos’s apprenticeship as assistants to Gilbert and George. “There was absolutely no creative input at all. They were very polite and it was interesting to hear them talking—as we did our daily penance.” What did the work involve? “Coloring in their prints. We colored in Gilbert and George’s penises for eight hours a day.” (Read more in the Guardian.)
Protect Rights of Artists in New Copyright Law
The head of the US Copyright Office has suggested that it may be time to start considering “the next great Copyright Act.” The last general revision to US copyright law passed in 1976 at the end of a process that took over twenty years. Since then, incredible technological advances have brought new opportunities and challenges to which copyright law has not been immune. In fact, with the advent of digital platforms and the internet, the centuries-old legal doctrine of copyright has perhaps faced more challenges than any other area of the law. (Read more in the Hill.)
Can Unions Save the Creative Class?
They’re just for hard hats. They peaked around the time Elvis was getting big. They killed Detroit. They’ve got nothing to do with you or me. They’re a special interest—and they hate our freedom. That’s the kind of noise you pick up in twenty-first-century America—in politics and popular culture alike—when you tune your station to the issue of trade unions. (Read more in Salon.)
Tackling Concerns of Independent Workers
Soon after landing a job at a Manhattan law firm nearly twenty years ago, Sara Horowitz was shocked to discover that it planned to treat her not as an employee, but as an independent contractor. Her status meant no health coverage, no pension plan, no paid vacation—nothing but a paycheck. She realized that she was part of a trend in which American employers relied increasingly on independent contractors, temporary workers, contract employees, and freelancers to cut costs. (Read more in the New York Times.)
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 20, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
Biotechnology as Art Form
It’s natural that some artists spend as much time in the lab as they do in the studio. Over the last three decades, in fact, artists have cultivated human tissue, bred frogs, assembled DNA profiles, and used modified bacteria as electrical transmitters. Bio-art—as this type of work is called—has also begun to surface in museums and avant-garde art festivals, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth in Australia. (Read more in ARTnews.)
What Do University Presses Do?
A book published by the University of Minnesota Press, begun as the author’s dissertation, had been discussed in the New Yorker. This journey, from dissertation to published book and beyond, provides a counter narrative to the rhetoric about scholarly publishers these days, rhetoric which paints us as parasites sucking profit and capital out of the work of scholars, structured around a “conflict” between publishers, libraries, and scholars often oversimplified into a binary. Publishers are interested in profit. Libraries and scholars are not. (Read more in the University of Minnesota Press Blog.)
What Do Cats Have to Do with It? Welcome to LACMA’s New Collections Website
Two years ago, we launched an experiment: an online image library where we made 2,000 high-resolution images of artworks that the museum deemed to be in the public domain available for download without any restrictions. This week, we’ve exceeded ourselves with the launch of our new collections website, giving away ten times the number of images we offered in the initial image library. Nearly 20,000 high-quality images of art from our collection are available to download and use as you see fit (that’s about a quarter of all the art represented on the site). (Read more in Unframed.)
What to Do with Artist’s Work after Death Can Be Vexing
Since the Oakland artist Thomas “Glen” Whittaker died last month, his longtime companion, Marcy Pitts, has faced the daunting task of deciding what to do with about thirty-five paintings and other works he left behind. More specifically, she has wrestled with how to catalog, value, transport, store, and market the works, some of which are several feet wide. At the forefront of Pitts’s mind is a desire to earn Whittaker, who was 62, recognition for his work. (Read more in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
Pre-Tenure Leadership
As the dean of a college whose faculty includes many assistant professors, I am frequently asked for advice on how much service they should undertake. The twin horns of their dilemma? They know that service counts for less than teaching or research in annual and promotion evaluations … but they also know that demonstrating leadership potential through community engagement is important. (Read more in Inside Higher Ed.)
Things I Didn’t Learn in Graduate School
For more than thirty years now, I have benefited in my professional practice in student affairs from having attended some terrific graduate programs. It’s important to say that explicitly, upfront, as I’m about to focus on the things I didn’t learn in graduate school. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Help Desk: Lazy Art Critic
An art critic who writes for local newspaper recently approached me to review a recent show I installed at a local gallery. He is essentially asking me to provide him with my thoughts on my work and, after reading several of his articles, it seems as if he will just quote me at length rather than provide an actual review of my work. Should I indulge him in my eagerness to gain press attention or decline in hopes of a future proposal from a more attentive critic? (Read more in Daily Serving.)
Art without Market, Art without Education: Political Economy of Art
Since the early days of modernism, artists have faced a peculiar dilemma with regard to the economy surrounding their work. By breaking from older artistic formations such as medieval artisan guilds, bohemian artists of the nineteenth century distanced themselves from the vulgar sphere of day-to-day commerce in favor of an idealized conception of art and authorship. While on the one hand this allowed for a certain rejection of normative bourgeois life, it also required that artists entrust their livelihoods to middlemen—to private agents or state organizations. While a concern with labor and fair compensation in the arts, exemplified by such recent initiatives as W.A.G.E. or earlier efforts such as the Art Workers Coalition, has been an important part of artistic discourse, so far it has focused primarily on public critique as a means to shame and reform institutions into developing a more fair system of compensation for “content providers.” It seems to me that we need to move beyond the critique of art institutions if we want to improve the relationship between artists and the economy surrounding their work. (Read more in e-flux Journal.)
Udo Kultermann: In Memoriam
posted by CAA — Mar 19, 2013
The following obituary was prepared by the family of the deceased and edited by CAA.
Udo Kultermann
Udo Kultermann, an internationally recognized scholar and Ruth and Norman Moore Professor Emeritus of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in Saint Louis, died on February 9, 2013, in New York. He was 85 years old.
Born in Germany in 1927, Kultermann received his PhD from the University of Münster and served as the director of the City Art Museum in Leverkusen. He came to the United States in 1967, where he taught at Washington University for over thirty years. Kultermann wrote more than thirty-five books on a wide range of subjects—many of which have been translated into various languages—and published numerous articles in scholarly journals worldwide. His book The History of Art History (1993) is among his most original and cited works.
Kultermann’s specialty was twentieth-century architecture, with a groundbreaking focus on Africa and the Middle East. His interests also included European art and architecture as well as contemporary American art. Recognizing the importance of female performance artists, Kultermann was one of the first art historians to write about them. After retiring from Washington University, he and his wife, Judith Kultermann, moved to New York, where she still resides.
Read more about Kultermann in the Washington University Newsroom.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Mar 13, 2013
Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.
NHA Annual Meeting and Humanities Advocacy Day
The National Humanities Alliance will hold its 2013 annual meeting on Monday, March 18, and Humanities Advocacy Day on Tuesday, March 19, both in Washington, DC. Premeeting sessions are tentatively scheduled to begin on Sunday afternoon, March 17. Events will take place on the George Washington University campus and Capitol Hill. (Read more from the National Humanities Alliance.)
Average Pay Increases for Professors on Tenure-Track Matched Inflation This Year
The median base salary for tenured and tenure-track faculty members increased this academic year by an average of 2.1 percent, matching the rate of inflation. That year-to-year increase was slightly higher than the growth last year, when the average increase was 1.9 percent, according to an annual report released by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
LACMA Moves to Take Over MOCA
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has made a formal proposal to acquire the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which has been struggling with financial troubles and staff and board defections. LACMA Director Michael Govan and the two cochairs of his board made the offer in a February 24 letter to the MOCA board cochairs, laying out the rationale for an acquisition. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)
Art Emerges from DNA Left Behind
They are the faces of real people, portraitlike sculptures etched from an almost powdery substance. The eye colors are distinct, the facial contours sharp, even though the artist, Heather Dewey-Hagborg, has never met or seen her subjects. Instead of using photographs or an art model for her work, she scoops detritus from New York City’s streets—cigarette butts, hair follicles, gum wrappers—and analyzes the genetic material people leave behind. Dewey-Hagborg, a PhD student in electronic arts, makes the faces after studying clues found in DNA. (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)
Can We Please Stop Drawing Trees on Top of Skyscrapers?
Just a couple of years ago, if you wanted to make something look trendier, you put a bird on it. Birds were everywhere. I’m not sure if Twitter was what started all the flutter, but it got so bad that Portlandia performed a skit named, you guessed it, “Put a Bird on It.” It turns out architects have been doing the same thing, just with trees. Want to make a skyscraper look trendy and sustainable? Put a tree on it. Or better yet, dozens. (Read more in Slate.)
Anthony Van Dyck Painting “Found Online”
A previously unknown painting by the seventeenth-century master Anthony Van Dyck has been identified after being spotted online. The portrait was previously thought to have been a copy and was in storage at the Bowes Museum in County Durham. But it was photographed for a project to put all of the United Kingdom’s oil paintings on the BBC Your Paintings website, where it was seen by an art historian. (Read more at BBC News.)
Can Art Forgers Be Artists Too?
Art forgeries are often decried for crime, but could they be considered art? Many young artists learn to copy the old masters before refining their own work, and contemporary artists often play with ideas of authorship. So can an art forger be considered a legitimate artist? Do they want to make a statement? What motivates art forgers to commit forgery? We spoke with Jonathon Keats, author of Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age. (Read more in the Oxford University Press Blog.)
The End of the Creative Classes in Sight
To put it bluntly, it seems that high-skill occupations can be mechanized and outsourced in much the same way as car manufacturing and personal finance. In recent decades, we have become accustomed to the notion that manual labor has been rendered obsolete, uncompetitive, or poorly paid. But are we now prepared for the same thing to happen to skilled labor, to white-collar workers, to the creative classes? (Read more in the Guardian.)