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.

Art Insurance Losses from Hurricane Sandy May Reach $500 Million

Two months after Hurricane Sandy caused severe flooding in many Chelsea galleries, the bill for the art world’s recovery is shaping up to be hefty. By mid-November, AXA Art Insurance, one of the largest art insurers, estimated that it would be paying out $40 million, and a recent Reuters report quoted industry estimates suggesting that insurance losses for flooded galleries and ruined art may come to as much as $500 million—or the rough equivalent of what the art insurance business takes in each year. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Sistine Chapel Tourists to Be Vacuumed and Cooled to Protect Frescoes

The five million tourists who visit the Sistine Chapel every year are to be vacuum cleaned and cooled down before entry in an effort to reduce the pollution damaging Michelangelo’s frescoes, the director of the Vatican museums said. Visitors who traipse sweat, dust, skin flakes, and hair into the sixteenth-century chapel will be “dusted, cleaned, and chilled,” Antonio Paolucci told the Italian daily Corriere della Sera. The heat and dirt generated by twenty thousand tourists pouring into the chapel every day has been blamed for the layers of grime accumulating on the paintings, which include Michelangelo’s depiction of God giving life to Adam. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Wondrous Horrors

Almost exactly a century ago, tens of thousands of New Yorkers converged on the 69th Regiment Armory at Lexington Avenue at 25th Street, eager to experience a dose of shock and loathing. Many more lapped up eyewitness accounts of grotesque paintings and sculpture shipped over from Europe, an art bursting with “eccentricities, whimsicalities, distortions, crudities, puerilities, and madness,” in one critic’s gleeful description. “The exploitation of a theory of discords, puzzles, ugliness, and clinical details, is to art what anarchy is to society.” (Read more from the Financial Times.)

Learning from Others’ CVs

While much of academe can be a black box (Why did a particular person get that prestigious fellowship? Why did the search committee decide to interview certain candidates? What explains an applicant’s successful outcome?), there is some information available for viewing about others’ career trajectories that is usually there for easy consulting. It is the curriculum vitae, a document that is now often readily accessible through an online search. Even if a traditional CV is not available for a particular person of interest, bits and pieces of information from here and there can help develop a sense of a person’s career path. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

What Search Committees Wish You Knew

While faculty search committees tend to be fairly homogenous, made up of academics in the same field as the new hire, administrative search committees are often an odd amalgam of people with varied expertise and often-competing views. Understanding the dynamics at play within search committees and the constraints under which they exist can help candidates navigate the hiring process more effectively. Having served on my fair share of committees inside and outside academe, I thought I would let you in on their inner workings and share a few things that search committees wish you knew, but will never actually reveal. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Geneva’s Art Storage Boom in Uncertain Times

It may contain a treasure trove of Picassos, but few have ever explored the riches in the Geneva free port art storage site. In difficult economic times, investors are turning to more unusual commodities to protect their money. Gold may be a tried and tested safe haven, but in recent years fine art has been attracting increasing amounts of cash. Last year global sales of art were estimated at more than $64 billion, and traders watching the market say art has consistently outperformed equities in the years between 2001 and 2011. (Read more from BBC News.)

Modern Art Notes’ 2012 Top Ten List

Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes offers his list of top ten exhibitions for 2012, which includes Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300–1350 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Zoe Strauss: Ten Years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau’s “Salome” at the Hammer Museum. (Read more from Modern Art Notes.)

From Etta James to Ravi Shankar: Notable Arts Deaths of 2012

The art world has been rocked by a series of high profile deaths this year. From Whitney and Etta to Maeve, Gore, and Ravi, the shocks kept coming. Here we round up the obituaries of some of the most-celebrated and greatly missed artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers who died in 2012. (Read more from the Independent.)