CAA News Today

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Tenure-Track Wisdom, Part One

Here is the first in a series of interviews with faculty who recently finished their first year on the tenure track. By reading about their experiences, new faculty members starting out this fall may get a better sense of what to expect. Today we hear from Sam Redman, who just finished his first year as an assistant professor of history at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he is also a faculty affiliate with the university’s Center for Heritage and Society. (Read more from Vitae.)

What Twitter Changes Might Mean for Academics

Time-based organization works really well for many popular academic uses of Twitter—particularly conferences, where it’s easy to find an interesting panel or meet-up in the moment, while the rest of the timeline becomes one historical record of the conference interactions. However, it’s precisely the timeline that may be at risk. (Read more from ProfHacker.)

Who and What Is Arts Education For?

We may consider art as a way of thinking, acquiring, and ordering knowledge with a boundless use of our imagination, as a way to make connections, and as a tool for subverting conventions in order to refresh and shape culture and improve society. “Art thinking” can be viewed as speculation based on wonder, free of dogma, not discarding anything except the overly obvious and trivial. Even chaos is part of this totality: nonlogical, nonlinear connections may be used as much as logical ones, and everything is available when seeking to construct new systems of order. (Read more from Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.)

UK Art Dealers Are Dodging Artist Resale Rights

The Artist Resale Right (ARR) might have been introduced in 2006, but many dealers in the United Kingdom are still choosing to treat this legal obligation as optional. “It’s still a big problem,” said Leonora Gummer, a senior manager at the Artist Collecting Society, one of two nonprofits dedicated to collecting ARR. “I still meet dealers, quite often, who say: ‘I’m not going to [pay].’” Gummer spoke alongside the lawyer Simon Stokes at a recent panel chaired by the Antiques Trade Gazette editor Ivan Macquisten at London’s inaugural Art Business Conference. (Read more from Artnet News.)

The Law against Artists: Public Art Often Loses Out in Court

When artists faced the destruction of New York’s graffiti mecca, Long Island City’s 5 Pointz, last year, they sued the property owner under something called the Visual Artists Rights Act. They lost. In part, they lost because a judge ruled that while the artists had been permitted to decorate the space, they “knew that the buildings were coming down.” They therefore couldn’t have expected that their work would be permanent. (Read more from the New York Observer.)

Creativity Creep

Every culture elects some central virtues, and creativity is one of ours. In fact, right now, we’re living through a creativity boom. Few qualities are more sought after, few skills more envied. Everyone wants to be more creative—how else, we think, can we become fully realized people? Creativity is now a literary genre unto itself: every year, more and more creativity books promise to teach creativity to the uncreative. A tower of them has risen on my desk—Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace’s Creativity, Inc.; Philip Petit’s Creativity: The Perfect Crime—each aiming to “unleash,” “unblock,” or “start the flow” of creativity at home, in the arts, or at work. (Read more from the New Yorker.)

Face It: Your Decks Will Never Be Cleared

One of the most widespread myths in academic writing is that you can, and should, try to “clear the decks”—that is, finish all of your other obligations before you can focus on your scholarship. The reality is: things never clear up. They don’t even reliably settle down. Your inbox is always full. The decks are always crowded. There is always more going on than you want or expect. Nonetheless, you can find ways to put your writing first and make sure that it gets done. Otherwise, everything but your writing will get done. (Read more from Vitae.)

To Help Emerging Artists, Let Collectors Resell Their Work

The art market is hot again, even for emerging artists—the typically hard-to-price, who-knows-where-this-is-headed group of young, living creators. At Phillips’s last Under the Influence auction, almost all of the work sold, much of it for double the estimated price or higher. This and other sales have generated reports of overheating, irrational exuberance due for a correction. Like some of the art market itself, such reports may be victims of their own hype. (Read more from Bloomberg Businessweek.)