CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted by Christopher Howard — Aug 26, 2015
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.
Black Arts: The $800 Million Family Selling Art Degrees and False Hopes
Behind the shiny façade at Academy of Art University in San Francisco is a less than lustrous business: luring starry-eyed art students into taking on massive amounts of debt based on the “revolutionary principle” that anyone can make a career as a professional artist. No observable talent is required to gain admission: the school will accept anyone who has a high school diploma and is willing to pay the $22,000 annual tuition (excluding room and board), no art portfolio required. (Read more from Forbes.)
Authors, Keep Your Copyrights. You Earned Them
Most trade publishers do not ask for an outright assignment of all exclusive rights under copyright; their contracts usually call for copyright to be in the author’s name. But it’s another story in the world of university presses. Most scholarly publishers routinely present their authors with the single most draconian, unfair clause we routinely encounter—taking all the exclusive rights to an author’s work as if the press itself authored the work. (Read more from the Authors Guild.)
How to Spot a Fake: Art Forgery’s Secrets Revealed
Can you tell if someone’s lying? There are scientifically proven traits that most people exhibit when they’re cooking up a lie. Sweaty palms. Dry throat. Tight collar. Fidgety movements. But can you tell if an object is lying? You sure can. Studying how forgers have successfully pulled the wool over our eyes offers some revealing clues as to how to avoid being fooled in the future. (Read more from Salon.)
Open Letter on Precariat Fees
A large and growing portion of the academy is unemployed or underemployed, and we all must consider how we can address the situation. We are writing to ask that you move to a graduated pay scale to provide steeply discounted rates for graduate students, unemployed, and non-tenure-track faculty for both membership in your organization and attendance at conferences that you sponsor. (Read more from Material Collective.)
Soaring Art Market Attracts a New Breed of Advisers for Collectors
For decades, art advisers were a small club of professionals who personally helped build collections for clients, using their scholarship and connoisseurship. Their role was to consult and offer expertise, rarely to make deals. But the rapidly changing art market—characterized by soaring prices, high fees, and a host of wealthy new buyers—has prompted scores of new players to jump into the pool, from young art-world arrivistes to former auction-house executives with an abundance of expertise and connections. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Inertia vs. Freedom in Faculty Life
It happens like clockwork each semester. Two weeks after a course begins, I brace myself for a wave of student complaints about the daily workload of questions, reading quizzes, and recurring tasks. I never cave to their demands, for I know just as surely that the flood of protests will begin to wither and, by the fourth week of the term, will have disappeared entirely. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
New Study Argues Mellon Program Has No Effect on Minority PhD Degrees
The Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship program—an initiative of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that works to boost the diversity of faculty at US colleges and universities—has “no significant effect” on PhD completion rates, according to a study by the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research. (Read more from Philanthropy News Digest.)
Italy’s Museums Honor Archaeologist Murdered by ISIL
Flags were flying at half-mast outside all museums and cultural institutions in Italy last week, and the archaeological museum of Milan, housed in a former Benedictine monastery, will change its name to commemorate Khaled Al-Asaad, the Syrian archaeologist murdered at Palmyra by ISIL on August 18. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)