CAA News

The next editions of CAA’s two directories of graduate programs in the arts will be published in an online format in fall 2011. First printed in December 2008 and January 2009 and still available for purchase, the CAA directories are the most comprehensive source books for graduate education for artists and art scholars, with program information for hundreds of schools, departments, and programs in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and elsewhere worldwide. Colleges, universities, and independent art schools are all included.

The pricing structure for the 2011 online editions has not yet been determined. Each current volume costs $49.95—$39.95 for CAA members—plus shipping and handling. You may order them online.

Graduate Programs in Art History includes programs in art history and visual studies, museum studies, curatorial studies, arts administration, library science, and related areas. Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts describes programs in studio art, graphic design, digital media, art education, conservation, historic preservation, film production, and more.

For more information, please send an email to directories@collegeart.org.

CAA offers two publishing grants—the Millard Meiss Publication Fund and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant—that have fall deadlines fast approaching.

Millard Meiss Publication Fund

CAA awards grants through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. For complete guidelines, application forms, a grant description, and past winners, please visit www.collegeart.org/meiss or write to publications@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 1, 2010.

Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant

Thanks to a second generous three-year grant from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, CAA awards a publication grant to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art and related subjects. Books eligible for the Wyeth grant have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. For complete guidelines, application forms, a grant description, and past winners, please visit www.collegeart.org/wyeth or write to publications@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 1, 2010.

At its meeting on May 2, 2010, the CAA Board of Directors voted to restore several important programs for the next fiscal year, beginning July 1. After a year of conservative budgeting in response to the economic downturn, the board eased financial constraints on the following programs that benefit CAA members.

Professional Development Fellowships

Later this fall, CAA will award five Professional Development Fellowships in the Visual Arts of $5,000 each to outstanding students who will receive MFA degrees in calendar year 2011. Eligibility requirements and application guidelines will be available on the CAA website by June 1, 2010; the deadline for applications will be October 1, 2010.

The number of artists applying for support has always been consistently high. Given this significant interest by artists—as well as the emphasis in CAA’s 2010–2015 Strategic Plan on strengthening programs and support for artist members—the board agreed that renewing artists’ fellowship is an important first step toward full restoration of the fellowship program.

Although the operating budget is lean, CAA hopes that Professional Development Fellowships in Art History can again be awarded to doctoral candidates in 2011.

The Art Bulletin and Art Journal

CAA’s two scholarly print publications, The Art Bulletin and Art Journal, will return to regular quarterly publication in 2011, with four issues appearing next year. In 2010, each journal is producing just three issues in response to the financial constraints of the previous fiscal year. The Art Bulletin combined its March and June 2010 issues, and Art Journal produced a joint Spring–Summer 2010 issue.

Millard Meiss Publication Fund

The CAA Publications Department will once again make grants to publishers from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund beginning this fall. The Meiss fund, founded in 1975, awards grants to support book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of art and related subjects that have been accepted by publishers on their merits, but cannot be published in the most desirable form without subsidy.

The grant program had been suspended for two cycles, in fall 2009 and spring 2010. Awards will also be made in spring 2011, pending later approval.

Several organizations, including the American Society of Media Photographers, the Professional Photographers of America, and the Graphic Artists Guild, have filed a class-action lawsuit against Google, claiming that by scanning millions of books the internet company has infringed on their members’ copyrights and failed to compensate them for their work.

According to Miguel Helft of the New York Times, the new lawsuit is separate from the Google Book Settlement between the company and a consortium of individuals and authors’ organizations. That decision is pending in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. Helft writes, “Google’s settlement with authors and publishers largely excluded photographs and other visual works. Legal experts said it was not unexpected that Google would face claims from groups that were not part of the original case and are not covered by it.”

Respondents to a recent survey on digital book publishing, produced by the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), say that digital book publishing is still a moving target, naming metadata bottlenecks, third-party vendors, and rights issues over images as major concerns.

The report, “Digital Publishing in the AAUP Community Survey Report: Winter 2009–2010,” shares responses to seven questions specifically about digital strategies, technologies, and concerns related to their book-publishing programs. The survey also collected new and updated information on specific e-publishing programs at member presses in order to update the association’s online directory of such projects.

According to the report, university presses are increasingly working to provide print-on-demand services for new and old titles, as well as partnering with digital aggregators such as Google Books for Publishers (91.5% of respondents), Amazon’s Search Inside the Book (76.3%), and Barnes and Noble See Inside (39%).
About 96.5% of AAUP member presses are working with the PDF, and 31.6% and 29.8% respectively using AZW (for Kindle) and EPUB formats. Many presses currently offer excerpts and chapters of books on their websites, and some have entire books available online.

Following the submission of the amended Google Book Settlement in November 2009, the deadline for opting out was extended. The new deadline is January 28, 2010 (postmarked or submitted online on or before that date).

Those who had not opted out of the settlement may still do so, and those who had opted out may now opt in, if they so wish. If you wish to maintain your previous status, you need not do anything. (Under a class-action settlement, all class members remain in the class unless they opt out.)

Opt-out forms (to mail in) and instructions for opting out online are available at the settlement website. You may also read the settlement FAQ for more information.

CAA is pleased to announce the finalists for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award and the Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for 2010. The winners of both prizes, along with the recipients of other Awards for Distinction, will be announced in early January and presented in February during Convocation at the 2010 Annual Conference in Chicago.

The Charles Rufus Morey Book Award honors an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in any language between September 1, 2008, and August 31, 2009. The four finalists are:

• Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009)
• Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008)
• Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008)
• Shelley Perlove and Larry Silver, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009)

The Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for museum scholarship is presented to the author(s) of an especially distinguished catalogue in the history of art, published between September 1, 2008, and August 31, 2009, under the auspices of a museum, library, or collection. The three finalists are:

• Andrea Bayer, ed., Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Yale University Press, 2008)
• Debra Diamond, Catherine Glynn, and Karni Singh Jasol, Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 2008)
• Sarah Greenough, Looking In: Robert Frank’s “The Americans” (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2009)

Convocation at the 2010 Annual Conference, which includes the awards ceremony, takes place on Wednesday evening, February 10, 5:30–7:00 PM, in Grand EF, East Tower, Gold Level, Hyatt Regency Chicago. The event is free and open to the public.

For more information about CAA’s Awards for Distinction, please contact Lauren Stark, CAA manager of programs, at 212-691-1051, ext. 248.

Humanities E-Book, a project of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), offers unlimited access to its collection of nearly 3,000 cross-searchable, full-text titles across the humanities and related social sciences. Titles, which include CAA Monographs on the Fine Arts, have been selected and peer reviewed by ACLS constituent learned societies for their continued importance and value in teaching and researching. The collection, which grows by about five hundred books a year, includes both in- and out-of-print titles published from the 1880s to the present. Titles link to publishers’ websites and to online reviews in JSTOR, Project MUSE, and other sites.

Individual Subscriptions

As a special benefit of membership, individual CAA members can have a twelve-month, renewable subscription to Humanities E-Book for $35, which helps sustain Humanities E-Book as a resource for the entire scholarly community.

Individual subscriptions are an attractive option for those whose institutions don’t already subscribe to Humanities E-Book, or for CAA members who might not be affiliated with a subscribing institution. Please check this list to see if your institution subscribes.

When completing the Humanities E-Book’s online purchase module, choose the College Art Association from the Society Affiliation pull-down menu and enter your CAA member number. Be sure to review the terms of service before subscribing. For inquiries, please write to subscriptions@hebook.org or call 212-697-1505.

Institutional Subscriptions

Humanities E-Book offers a special 10 percent discount on subscriptions to institutional CAA members. Subscriptions range from $450 to $3,125, depending on the size of your institution.

Subscription information, including pricing, is available on the Humanities E-Book website. For a free trial, a subscription, or further information, please write to info@hebook.org and mention that you are an institutional CAA member.

CAA is pleased to announce four recipients of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant for 2009:

• Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, MIT Press
• Kevin D. Murphy, Jonathan Fisher of Blue Hill, Maine: Commerce, Culture, and Community on the Eastern Frontier, University of Massachusetts Press
• David Raskin, Donald Judd’s Local Orders: Art, Principles, and Activism, Yale University Press
• Alison Syme, A Touch of Blossom: John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art, Pennsylvania State University Press

Since 2005, Wyeth grants have annually supported one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy.

For purposes of this grant program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico prior to 1970.

Application criteria and guidelines for the Wyeth Grant are available at www.collegeart.org/wyeth or from publications@collegeart.org. Deadline: October 1, 2010.

Today is the deadline for a revised settlement agreement to be filed in response to a lawsuit by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, who are protesting the unauthorized copying of in-copyright books by Google.

CAA has prepared a summary article on the Google Library Book Project to better inform you about the issues at stake; included are a brief description of aspects of the settlement and links to articles and editorials from authors and reporters supporting or criticizing the settlement.

CAA’s constituency includes both creators and users of books. The Committee on Intellectual Property has taken up the matter for consideration and is currently considering what position, if any, to recommend.