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.

The Young Wellesley Professor Who Invented Contemporary Art

When you think of the cities that helped define cutting-edge art in the twentieth century, you think of Paris, New York, maybe Berlin. In the standard histories, Boston plays a decidedly background role, with the city’s gatekeepers ensuring that the wild works by artists like Picasso, Braque, or Mondrian didn’t soil their elegant private and public collections. “Boston is very dead so far as contemporary art is concerned,” complained a young Wellesley art-history instructor, Alfred Barr Jr., writing to a friend and gallery owner in New York in 1926, well after modernism had caught fire elsewhere. (Read more in the Boston Globe.)

How to Build a Digital Humanities Took in a Week

Twelve scholars convened at the George Mason University last week to build a web application for the digital humanities as part of the “One Week | One Tool” challenge, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The participants—who included web developers, faculty members, museum professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, and a high-school librarian—spent five days brainstorming, designing, and developing their tool. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Arts Majors Jump Ahead of Tech Grads in Landing Jobs

Here’s a surprise for college students: recent graduates with technology degrees are having a tougher time finding a job than their peers in the arts. The unemployment rate for recent grads with a degree in information systems is more than double that of drama and theater majors, at 14.7 percent vs. 6.4 percent, according to a recent Georgetown University study. Even for computer science majors, the jobless rate for recent grads nears 9 percent. (Read more in USA Today.)

Protecting Detroit’s Artwork Is a Job for Detroit

By now, everybody knows that the city of Detroit has finally filed for bankruptcy—and everybody in the art world knows that its museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, is in deep trouble. Here’s why: Detroit owes roughly $18 billion that it doesn’t have. The sixty-thousand-plus works of art in the permanent collection are owned by the city, not the museum (as is normally the case). According to the Detroit Free Press, the thirty-eight most important pieces have a market value of about $2.5 billion. What next? (Read more in the Wall Street Journal.)

Only the Artists Can Save the Arts Critics

How do you put a price on thought? How do you price an opinion? How do you even price the creative thought that the opinion was formed on? How do you do this in a culture—I think that’s the right word—where people are used not only to getting opinion for nothing, but expect good information for nothing as well? (Read more in the Guardian.)

Caveat Emptor: An Art Exhibit Made Entirely of Forgeries Confiscated by the FBI

Upon entering Caveat Emptor you will likely recognize the exhibition’s work with confidence. Iconic pieces made famous by art legends such as Chagall, Warhol, Gauguin, and de Kooning adorn the walls, and yet, you probably haven’t heard of a single artist showing. That’s right, Caveat Emptor, which translates to “let the buyer beware,” is composed entirely of forgeries that have been confiscated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. (Read more in the Huffington Post.)

The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Midcentury Books Vanish

Last year I wrote about research being done by Paul J. Heald at the University of Illinois, based on software that crawled Amazon for a random selection of books. At the time, his results were only preliminary, but they were nevertheless startling: there were as many books available from the 1910s as there were from the 2000s. The number of books from the 1850s was double the number available from the 1950s. Why? Copyright protections—which cover titles published in 1923 and after—had squashed the market for books from the mid-twentieth century, keeping those titles off shelves and out of the hands of the reading public. (Read more in the Atlantic.)

Did You Hear That? It Was Art

Nothing? Listen again. Note the sound of your computer’s fan amid distant sirens. Hear your spouse in the next room, playing the Bowie channel on Spotify while chatting on the phone with your mother-in-law. Farther off, a TV is tuned to the news and a stereo plays Bach, while a mouse skitters inside a wall. And know that every one of those sounds can now be the subject of art, just as every vision we see and imagine, from fruit in a bowl to the color of light to melting clocks, has been grist for painting and sculpture and photos. (Read more in the New York Times.)

As we all know, the health-insurance industry is undergoing significant change due to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), signed into law in March 2010. The New York Life Insurance Company recently informed CAA that it will no longer offer catastrophic healthcare coverage previously available to CAA members. CAA investigated the possibility of offering members health insurance through another company but found this is no longer an option to associations whose members reside in different states.

Here’s the good news: PPACA includes comprehensive reform that is designed to provide affordable health coverage for all individuals. The average premium for individuals who purchase coverage directly today (i.e., they do not receive coverage through their employer) is expected to decline significantly.

Individuals can purchase medical insurance on or after January 1, 2014 without regard to health status and/or limitations because of preexisting conditions or impairment. Purchases for health coverage may be made through the Health Insurance Marketplace, state insurance exchanges, or the federal insurance exchange. Open enrollment for the exchanges starts on October 1, 2013, and ends on March 31, 2014.

Information on insurance plans state-by-state and how the insurance exchanges will work may be obtained at www.healthcare.gov or by calling 800-318-2596, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

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.

Art Collection Assessed as Detroit Nears Bankruptcy

As the city of Detroit’s bankruptcy case survived its first legal challenges in federal court, the Detroit Institute of Arts remains at the center of a national debate over what city-owned property can and should be liquidated to help cover its estimated $18 billion debt. At some point in the past two months, Christie’s auction house sent two employees to Detroit to assess the collection. The employees did not meet with museum leadership during their visit. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

Embargoes for Dissertations?

The American Historical Association has released a policy calling on history departments and university libraries to allow students to place embargoes on the online versions of PhD dissertations in the field for up to six years. The association says that such a policy is needed to enable new PhDs to successfully publish books based on their dissertations. But some historians are upset about the proposal, which they say isn’t needed and runs counter to the scholarly mission of sharing research findings. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Publishing Your Dissertation Online: What’s a New PhD to Do?

The American Historical Association recently released a controversial statement that strongly advised graduate programs and libraries to adopt a policy allowing the embargoing of the publication of completed dissertations online for up to six years. Supporters argue that it protects junior authors, given that in the current academic climate a completed and published single-authored monograph continues to be the standard for tenure and promotion. Opponents counter with several arguments, such as making the dissertation research public allows the junior scholar to gain credit for his or her work. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Jeffrey Deitch Resigns as Head of Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

Jeffrey Deitch has made it official: he’ll be stepping down after a stormy three years as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The museum’s board said it had launched a search for his successor. Deitch told the board of his decision to leave at a recent meeting, according to an official statement. “He will stay on to ensure a smooth transition and the successful completion” of a campaign begun in March to boost the museum’s endowment to $100 million. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)

From Art Book to iPad App: Josef Albers’s Classic Work Undergoes a “Magical” Transformation

Interaction of Color—Josef Albers’s iconic book that taught legions of students and professionals alike how to think creatively about color—has been given a modern makeover as an iPad app, just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication by Yale University Press. The app, which combines Albers’s traditional teaching methods with twenty-first-century technology, was created by the press and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and developed by Potion, an award-winning design and technology firm specializing in interactive experiences. (Read more in Yale News.)

Genres, Like Sand, Tricky to Pin Down

It is pitch dark as you are swallowed up in a crowd of unknowable size, voices chanting and burbling around you, bodies jostling close by. There is no way to know how big the room is, where you are going, or whether you are about to collide with a wall or a human. It is Tino Sehgal’s This Variation, and as your eyes adjust, performers become slowly visible, moving amid the crowd, dancing and singing or pausing to talk about money and jobs. (Read more in the New York Times.)

Is the Australian Resale Royalty Scheme Benefiting Indigenous Artists?

Australia’s artist resale royalty scheme, which came into effect in June 2010 and is currently being reviewed, seems to be offering increased protection to indigenous artists, with 60 percent of the artists who have been paid royalties being Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Indeed, one of the driving forces behind the introduction of the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Bill was to improve the welfare of indigenous artists. (Read more in the Art Newspaper.)

Union Raises for Adjuncts

When adjuncts push to unionize, they typically want better pay, better benefits (or any benefits if they don’t have them), and job security. With unionization drives spreading, a key question is: does collective bargaining yield meaningful gains? The results of numerous initial contracts suggest the answer is “Yes.” Negotiations on first contracts can take six months or more, but gains in those contracts frequently include significant pay increases and other, nonfinancial benefits. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

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 Rise of the Machines: NEH and the Digital Humanities, the Early Years

Stephen Mitchell suffered from allergies. “When the trees come out, I can’t see. People stand around saying, ‘Isn’t it lovely,’ but I weep,” he told the New York Times in 1965. A thirty-five-year-old professor at Syracuse University, he found sanctuary in the temperature-controlled environment of the school’s computer center, where he surprised many people by showing how computers could be used to advance work in the humanities. (Read more in Humanities.)

Well-Marked Paths to Tenure Put New Professors at Ease

Peter Seldin has visited more than 350 colleges as a consultant specializing in faculty evaluation. At nearly every one, he says, young faculty members have the same problem: “They are scared to death.” The reason, he says, is that unclear expectations about tenure generate apprehension among tenure-track faculty members who are worried their careers might stall or jump the rails. (Read more in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

AHA Statement on Policies regarding the Embargoing of Completed History PhD Dissertations

In its June 2013 meeting, the AHA Council drafted a statement on policies regarding best practices for embargoing completed history PhD dissertations. “The American Historical Association,” the document begins, “strongly encourages graduate programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years.” (Read more from the American Historical Association.)

Detroit Art Caught in Bankruptcy Battle

Detroit, which became the largest city to declare bankruptcy in United States history, is home to one of the most prestigious collections of art in the world. And one of the options on the table to deal with its crippling debt is for all of that to be sold. But it’s not so simple. To Rod Spencer, the Detroit Institute of Arts is priceless. “The DIA is the history of Detroit. That’s what it means to me,” he said. (Read more from CBS News.)

Does Art Help the Economy?

An unexpected upshot in the wake of Britain’s latest spending review was the fate of the culture budget—it avoided a pummeling. What might be considered an easy target in a time of austerity emerged relatively unscathed, with only a 5 percent decrease in funding from £472 million to £451 million. The arts world had already been hit by a 30 percent cut meted out in the 2010 budget and had been waiting to find out whether they might be granted a reprieve at this latest round of belt-tightening. This time, advocates for arts funding breathed a collective sigh of relief, with the budget reduction described as a “best-case scenario.” (Read more in the Atlantic.)

LACMA, Broad, and Other Art Museums Work to Put Storage on Display

Behind an art museum’s gleaming galleries lies the off-limits and uninviting space that can hold as much as 95 percent of its collection: storage. These spaces are often packed with hundreds or even thousands of paintings, decorative art objects, and other artifacts that can languish, unappreciated and untouched by curators, for years. But as a way to bring art out from its underbelly and display more of a museum’s possessions, several institutions are embracing “visible storage” in public areas, exhibiting the art without the expense of a spacious, beautifully installed and curated show. (Read more in the Los Angeles Times.)

Smithsonian Institution Grapples with Maintenance of Its Growing Inventory

The world’s largest museum complex is bursting with stuff, from elephants to first-lady gowns, biological specimens to space shuttles. Now, the Smithsonian Institution is grappling with a long-term challenge: how to maintain the 137 million items in its collection. Last week the Committee on House Administration held a collections stewardship hearing to discuss challenges to implementing a maintenance plan to care for the art, archival footage, and dinosaur bones. (Read more in the Washington Post.)

Art Education Fails to Paint a Pretty Picture

The views of older men of painting are often dismissed as out-of-touch and old-fashioned, harking back to a mythical golden age. But the critical remarks made by the acclaimed artist Ken Currie, in advance of his first exhibition in over ten years—Meditations on Portraiture at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery—warrant consideration. He raises serious questions about the problems with art schools today. (Read more in the Scotsman.)