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.

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.)

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.)

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.)