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.

Artist Resale Rights Gain Support in US Congress

A bill that would bring droit de suite, also known as artist resale royalty rights, to the United States is gaining momentum in Congress. The bill has gained six cosponsors in the past three weeks, including Representatives Sam Farr of California and Janice Schakowsky of Illinois. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Arts Companies Must Adapt to Changes at Facebook, Report Reveals

For some time now, marketers in the arts and culture sector have been worrying that updates to Facebook have resulted in their messages reaching fewer and fewer people. A new report released by the digital consultancy firm One Further reveals that these fears are justified and that a new approach to Facebook page management may be necessary. However, it’s not all doom and gloom: opportunities still exist, and arts marketers are adapting accordingly. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Revise and Resubmit!

I’m sure you’ve heard the adage “publish or perish.” In order to get tenure—or, as the abysmal job market begets hyperprofessionalization, to be considered for a job at all—a scholar must have a certain amount of articles appear in “peer-reviewed” academic journals. These journals—Obscure Subfield Quarterly, One-Word Pretentious Greek Thing, etc.—usually have a circulation of about three hundred, and those articles upon which careers depend are usually read by exactly three people. (Read more from Slate.)

How Abstract Art Can Change the Way You See Waste and Consumption in America

Abstract artwork is sometimes misinterpreted as being flatly indiscernible, when in fact it’s often simply enchanting and destabilizing, requiring a moment of contemplation from the viewer. This exhibition seeks not only to demystify abstract art but also consumption, a term that, despite its looming unwieldy aura, can be combatted in the comforts of your home, and in the confines of your humble garbage bin. (Read more from Huffington Post.)

How Much Are Curators Really Paid?

Many in the art world were staggered by recent reports that the Italian curator Germano Celant is being paid €750,000 to organize a pavilion for the Milan Expo 2015. Celant’s fee—and the incredulity it provoked—raises questions about how much curators are typically paid for organizing biennials and large-scale international exhibitions. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

The Digital Art Historian’s Toolkit

Lists of tools like this one invariably age poorly. For an always-up-to-date, much more comprehensive list of useful digital tools, see the excellent DiRT Directory. However, we felt it might be useful to our participants to have a snapshot of tools that could be useful to art historians specifically. We’ve focused here on free, off-the-shelf tools that don’t require programming knowledge and might be particularly interesting to people who work with a lot of images. (Read more from Beyond the Digital Slide Library.)

Blaming the Victim: Ladder Faculty and the Lack of Adjunct Activism

The adjunct labor movement has necessarily prioritized the working conditions of part-time faculty, many of whom are living below the poverty line. But adjuncts need not be card-carrying union members to benefit from these victories, which have transformed academia’s once-invisible underclass into its most vocal majority. The inequalities in academic employment may still be firmly in place, but thanks to these unionization efforts, contingent faculty are now active participants in the national conversation about the future of higher education. (Read more from Vitae.)

A Banker, a Scholar, and the Invention of Art History: The Story of the Warburg Brothers

Emily J. Levine’s new book details the contradictions and confusions of Jewish life in Hamburg, with ancient religious traditions vying with modern currents of thought, and ancient caution competing with tentative hopes when Jews at last began to breach the barriers of anti-Semitism in German society. Focusing on Aby Warburg’s library and two of its most illustrious users, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer and the art historian Erwin Panofsky, she reveals the ways in which the distinctive qualities of a single place conditioned the development of ideas in a larger sense to create a “Hamburg School” of thought, a school intimately connected with Jewish experience in Imperial and Weimar Germany. (Read more from the New Republic.)