CAA News Today

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Donald Trump, Taste, and the Cultural Elite

It’s said that taste defines us. The music I like lets you know, to some degree, what kind of person I am. Yet though this year’s presidential election has raised issues of racism, sexism, and classism, not much has been said about taste, and the role it may or may not have played in getting Donald Trump to the White House. (Read more from the Washington Post.) 

Now, More Than Ever, Designers Must Transform America

Thoughtful design, whether it’s a logo, an object, or a well-organized protest, has always had the ability to effect political change. And yet, in days following the election, the power of design felt—at least momentarily—diminished. Graphic design didn’t affect the outcome. (Read more from Wired.)

The Obligation to Explain

One of the striking aspects of the controversy around Kelley Walker’s exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis is how many important issues it raises: the perilous state of race relations; the dilemmas that arise when one person’s freedom of speech is perceived as hate speech; whether white artists can tackle the subject of black experience without engaging in cultural appropriation; and the extent to which social media pressures museums to bring more transparency to their curatorial process. (Read more from Artcritical.)

Iconic Ancient Sites Ravaged in ISIS’s Last Stand in Iraq

Recently released satellite imagery of archaeological sites around the northern Iraqi city of Mosul has revealed extensive destruction at two capital cities of ancient Mesopotamia, according to researchers with the American Schools of Oriental Research Cultural Heritage Initiatives. (Read more from National Geographic.)

The Future of the Tiny Liberal-Arts College

At first glance, it sounds like a grim affair: a group of fifteen presidents from the country’s tiniest liberal-arts institutions met in New York in June, even amid experts’ predictions of small-college mergers and closings. Attendees who were at the meeting report the mood was far from somber, though. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Crash and Burn

Your course plan looked great on paper. It passed departmental faculty review. Perhaps it even integrated some progressive pedagogical experimentations. In sum, the class held real promise. But when it got to the classroom, your first-run of the course was received with far less enthusiasm than you anticipated. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

Auditioning for the Role of Colleague

Far too many graduate students earnestly prepare for their job talk as if the talk itself is what matters most. It was not until a casual meeting with a member of my dissertation committee in her cozy office that I learned the secret to delivering a great job talk: nothing matters more than how you manage the Q&A portion. (Read more from Vitae.)

Makeover Mania: Inside the Twenty-First-Century Craze for Redesigning Everything

In theory, the redesign begins with a problem. The problem might be specific or systemic or subjective. A logo makes a company’s image feel out of date. A familiar household object has been overtaken by new technology. A service has become too confusing for new users. The world is, after all, full of problems. (Read more from the New York Times Magazine.)

Why Do Colleges Have So Much Art?

Public or private, rural or urban, college museums are tackling ambitious projects like never before, promoting academic curators—who were once part of a sleepier, insular art world—to be lead actors on the cultural stage. But not everyone agrees that school museums should compete with their mainstream counterparts or that students necessarily benefit more from having art of such magnitude as opposed to more modest collections. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

When Will We Learn?

“Twice as good” is the standard set for generations of black and brown children across America, a warning consistently administered in stern but loving tones from parental figures as dissimilar as the fictional Rowan Pope and first lady Michelle Obama. Yet in academia, all too often “twice as good” still isn’t good enough. (Read more from the Root.)

How a Sculptor Adapted to Today’s Economy

Matt Langford is a formally trained sculptor who now does finishing work in a prototype lab at GE’s additive-manufacturing facility in Cincinnati. The Atlantic spoke with him about his training as a sculptor, how he’s transitioned those skills as technology advances, and how American industries treat older workers. (Read more from the Atlantic.)

Reading Your Application File

If you’re on the academic job market, you’re in the process of assembling and sending out application packages. There’s a lot of great advice out there on crafting CVs, cover letters, and other job documents. Here I want to do something different: give you a mental image of what is happening on the other side of the hiring table, so you can put yourself in the shoes of a search-committee member. (Read more from Vitae.)

Making Office Hours Matter

If you are like me, you spend the majority of your office hours staring at the door, willing your students to walk in and use the time you set aside for their benefit. Why is it that so few of them take advantage of this time, and how can we get more of them to do so? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

What’s Driving the Surge in Art Books?

Art books are niche products. Hardly anyone reads them, you can’t make money with them, and anyway, there’s the internet. And yet an increasing number galleries have begun producing books. Why? (Read more from Artnet News.)

Revisiting: Why Publishers’ Brands Matter

Brands matter because authors think they do. The best brands attract the best authors—a virtuous circle in which good authors strengthen brands and brands confer their aura on authors. Brands also matter to readers in direct and indirect ways, and the indirect importance has the most influence on the individuals who purchase books. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

New Research Reveals Startling Stats on Student Stress

Between tough classes, on-campus involvement, and trying to have a social life, your college years are likely to be the most stressful time of your life so far. Maybe that’s what you went in expecting, but the statistics surrounding college students and stress are still pretty shocking. (Read more from Course Hero.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Net Art Anthology Launches

Net Art Anthology, Rhizome’s two-year online exhibition presenting one hundred works of restored and reperformed net art, has launched. The project will be divided into five chapters: early network cultures and early web; Flash and blogs; surf clubs, early postinternet art, and social-media platforms; and mobile apps and social-media saturation. (Read more from Rhizome.)

Artificial Intelligence as a Bridge for Art and Reality

How to get people interested in art? How to engage millennials? How to expose permanent-collection works that sit in storage? These are questions art museums constantly ponder. Recently, Tate Britain asked another one: How can artificial intelligence help? (Read more from the New York Times.)

MIT Task Force Releases Preliminary “Future of Libraries” Report

An MIT task force has released a preliminary report featuring proposals to help the school’s library system become an “open global platform” enabling the discovery, use, and stewardship of information and knowledge for future generations. The report contains recommendations to develop a global library for a global university while strengthening the library’s relationship with local academic and public communities. (Read more from MIT News.)

Help Desk: Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

Simple in theory, painful in practice—but the way to break up a collaborative partnership is the same as for a romantic one: with as much honesty and compassion as you can muster. If you’re splitting up to pursue solo projects, then you have to say so; if you’ve found a new collaborator, you’ll need to announce it. (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Why Are Some Artists Remembered More Than Others?

Every year, thousands of art-school graduates across the globe embark on their careers in the hopes of becoming professional artists. With the influx of new talent, older generations inevitably make way. But why are some artists remembered and revered, while others remain forgotten? (Read more from Artnet News.)

How Important Is Art History in Today’s Market?

“Rembrandt weeps.” “The humanities are under assault.” “An educational disaster.” These were just a few of the howls of online dismay that followed the announcement that AQA, the last examining board offering History of Art as an A-level test to 16- to 18-year-olds in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, would be dropping the subject. The small number of students taking the subject and its wide range of topics had made it difficult to compare exam performance, the board explained. (Read more from the New York Times.)

The Remix Wars: Originality in the Age of Digital Reproduction

Is there nothing new under the sun? In the first of a series of articles, New Atlas will examine how twenty-first-century digital technology has given artists a set of tools that has dismantled traditional definitions of originality and is challenging the notions of copyright that dominated much of the twentieth century. (Read more from New Atlas.)

MoMA Curator Laura Hoptman on How to Tell a Good Painting from a “Bogus” Painting

A veteran organizer of cutting-edge exhibitions, Laura Hoptman built her career in part through her insistence on championing the medium, even—or perhaps especially—through its perennial periods of unpopularity and critical disdain. This has earned her both accolades and scorn, but her track record of introducing vital contemporary painters to American audiences largely speaks for itself. (Read more from Artspace.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Doubts about Date: 2016 Survey of Faculty Attitudes of Technology

Most faculty members say data-driven assessments and accountability efforts aren’t helping them improve the quality of teaching and learning at their colleges and universities, according to the 2016 Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology. Instead, instructors and many academic technology administrators say the efforts are mainly designed to satisfy accreditors and politicians. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Next Step in Diversifying the Faculty

These days there’s no escaping discussions about the need to diversify academe. So it should be. A recent addition to this brimming conversation was a widely discussed essay in The Hechinger Report from Marybeth Gasman, in which she argued that there aren’t more people of color on faculties for a simple reason: colleges and universities don’t want them. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

After a Decade of Growth, MFA Enrollment Is Dropping

Across the country, art schools have minted a growing number of visual art MFA programs over the last ten to fifteen years. Many of them now face a challenge, as application numbers and enrollment figures are falling, according to the better part of a dozen insiders who spoke to Artnet News, some of them on condition of anonymity. (Read more from Artnet News.)

David Salle’s How to See, a Painter’s Guide to Looking at and Discussing Art

The painter David Salle, in his new book How to See: Looking, Talking, and Thinking about Art, goes bravely in search of happiness. His quarry is aesthetic bliss. Salle’s mission is to seize art back from the sort of critics who treat each painting “as a position paper, with the artist cast as a kind of philosopher manqué.” (Read more from the New York Times.)

Toxic Art: Is Anyone Sure What’s in a Tube of Paint?

Artists get called many things—geniuses, madmen, rebels, unemployed—but rarely chemists. Painters, however, increasingly find that they need a degree in organic chemistry when they go to an art-supply store and try to buy a tube of paint. (Read more from the New York Observer.)

How to Work in the Art World without Selling Out Your Politics

What if you realized that an entire community of people were underrepresented in the arts, so you created your own area of study in college to push their work to the forefront? What if you spent the next thirty years trying to change the ratio? Would you have the perseverance to get there? (Read more from New York.)

Why Attend Conferences as a Freelance Academic?

Attending a conference without an institutional affiliation can feel alienating. That alienation, combined with the fact that many freelance academics are no longer searching for faculty positions, can make conferences seem like a colossal waste of time and money. What could you possibly contribute? (Read more from Vitae.)

Missing Out on the Fear of Missing Out

There are three openings tonight in three different parts of the city and it’s only possible to do one. Your old friend, your new friend, and the hip space that just opened. Now make a choice. Was it the right one? (Read more from Momus.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

“All art is political”: A Conversation with Hank Willis Thomas

Cofounded in January by Hank Willis Thomas as the first artist-run super PAC, For Freedoms has been working tirelessly to engage the public in critical discourse about our political system. For those unfamiliar, a super PAC is an independent political action committee that can raise unlimited funds from corporations, unions, associations, and individuals. (Read more from Arts ATL.)

Make No Mistake, Art History Is a Hard Subject. What’s Soft Is the Decision to Scrap It

In the UK, art history A-level is to be scrapped in 2018. The decision taken by the exam board AQA seems related to the Conservative government’s policy of ranking subjects by perceived relative difficulty, using an analogy of “soft” and “hard” that may be designed to belittle students and teachers who have apparently taken the easy way out. (Read more from Apollo.)

Where Social-Media Sensation Kimberly Drew Sees the Art World in Ten Years

Kimberly Drew stands as one of black contemporary art’s most visible champions. With north of 100,000 followers subscribed to her Instagram handle alone—joined by thousands more across Twitter and Facebook—Drew’s presence is fortified by the type of institutional sheen that comes with running the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s social-media channels. (Read more from Artnet News.)

How Many Hours a Week Should Academics Work?

How many hours do you work in a week? Many academics feel overworked and exhausted by their jobs. But there is little evidence that long hours lead to better results, while some research suggests that they may even be counterproductive. (Read more from Times Higher Education.)

Tasked with Creating a Catalogue Raisonné, These Art Historians Become Detectives

“Something like provenance is the most time-consuming aspect of a catalogue raisonné because, basically, it is detective work,” said Katy Rogers, who coauthored the Robert Motherwell catalogue raisonné and currently serves as the project’s director. “You’re tracking down people, and you’re finding out their stories.” (Read more from Artsy.)

Data Ethics Is a Challenge That Major Foundations Can’t Afford to Ignore

If I ask you to picture “big data,” what do you think of? You probably didn’t think first of a grant-making foundation, social-justice group, or humanitarian-assistance organization. Compared to government agencies and large companies, key players in the social sector lag far behind in realizing the potential of data-intensive methods. (Read more from Equals Change Blog.)

Should We Kill the Conference Panel?

The reality is that the room dynamics of panels just don’t work all that well. It is difficult for panelists to build a narrative that will capture the audience’s attention. Panel discussions become performative rather than enlightening or challenging, and none of us is as good at speaking extemporaneously as we think we are. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Middle Market Squeeze, Part II: A Reality Check for Art Galleries

If a flush but lopsided art economy invites confusion, it also demands takeaways. The against-all-economic-odds gallery once begun with boundless ambition and maxed-out credit cards is no more. Here’s the same idea put differently: the era of undercapitalized, illiquid, labor-of-love galleries that rely mostly or exclusively on the primary market for sales is over. (Read more from Artnet News.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Cruelty and Kindness in Academia

Academics don’t have a reputation for being kind. To put it gently, higher education values intellect over affect. Kindness tends to be viewed as the opposite of criticism. Scholars, after all, are trained in critique, and not necessarily the constructive kind. (Read more from Vitae.)

Why New-Media Art Still Hasn’t Fully Gone Mainstream

Artists working in “new” media have never been so widely admired—a generation of artists in their twenties and thirties, including Amalia Ulman, Neil Beloufa, Ian Cheng, Jon Rafman, and Cécile B. Evans, are now shown internationally. Yet a quarter of a century after the emergence of digital art, it continues to raise challenges for museums, galleries, and collectors. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

The Questions We Should Be Asking Our Students

How much do you know about how your students study? I’ve been asking the question a lot lately, and most of the answers I’ve heard aren’t all that impressive. They’re more about how the faculty member thinks students study, how they should study, or how they aren’t studying. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

What It Takes to Recover a Stolen Work of Art

A recent highly publicized announcement that two stolen van Gogh paintings had been recovered after fourteen years was a welcome surprise. How do thieves make off with a painting? What should a victim do after realizing they’ve been robbed? Why are only a tiny percentage of works recovered? (Read more from Artsy.)

Alizarin Crimson: Now You See It…

If a single color embodies the dividing line between pigments considered suitable for permanent works of art and those that are suspect and poor in lightfastness, Alizarin Crimson (PR 83) would be it. And yet the color is still used by many artists who are drawn to it in spite of its many problems. (Read more from Just Paint.)

Old Media, New Media, Data Media: Evolving Publishing Paradigms

Not so long ago we routinely talked of old vs. new media. The old was characterized by investment in and creation of content, which gave rise to a common set of properties—definitive and authoritative journalism and scientific reports, the fixed text, and the pursuit of the finest authors and top creative talent. New media, on the other hand, was digital and had its own set of properties. (Read more from the Scholarly Kitchen.)

The Rise of Living-Room Galleries in London

Young artists and curators throughout London are organizing public exhibitions in their own homes. Many are recent graduates who cannot afford the hefty cost of renting a temporary space. “There’s a pressing need for young artists to find inexpensive places to show art,” said Elena Colman. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

What’s behind Art’s Uneasy Celebrity Courtship?

The art world collectively raised its eyebrows when Sotheby’s Hong Kong announced a collaborative curated auction with Choi Seung-hyun, the 28-year-old Korean boy-band star known as T.O.P. Yet the art world’s newly discovered courtship of celebrity is deeper than it seems, which is why it’s making so many people uneasy. (Read more from Artnet News.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Burning Questions: How Can I Promote My Exhibition?

I’ve got an exhibition coming up at a small artist-run gallery space. They don’t have any real budget for promotion or anything like that. So I’m wondering something: What are the best low-cost (preferably free) ways to promote my exhibition? (Read more from Burnaway.)

Islamic Extremist Sentenced to Nine Years in Prison for Destroying Timbuktu Mausoleums

In an unprecedented move, Ahmad Al-Faqi Al-Mahdi pleaded guilty to war crimes for ordering the razing of nine mausoleums and the fifteenth-century Sidi Yahia mosque in the ancient city of Timbuktu in northern Mali. The historic verdict marks the first time the international criminal court in The Hague has heard a case about the demolition of cultural heritage. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

What Is the Real Impact of Public Art Programs?

The production and introduction of artworks into the public domain started to be regulated and organized by national programs in the 1930s. Although state-sponsored institutions—such as the US Federal Art Project, the USSR’s Ministry of Culture, and the Chinese Communist Party’s art-related efforts—primarily pursued propaganda goals, this laid the foundation for public art programs worldwide. (Read more from Artnet News.)

Racially Charged St. Louis Contemporary Art Museum Show Sparks Outrage

Racially charged works at a Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis exhibition have some calling for boycotts and the resignation of the museum’s chief curator. The museum has opted to build walls around the controversial pieces of art. The show will remain up and visitors will have access to all of the work. (Read more from Fox 2 News.)

Gallery Defends Kelley Walker, Artist under Fire in St. Louis Exhibit

The New York City–based gallery representing the artist Kelley Walker has responded to the controversy surrounding a racially charged exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Saint Louis, but with a statement that raises more questions than it answers. (Read more from the Riverfront Times.)

Black Arts Community Expresses Outrage with Kelley Walker

“This is a mess, and I’m uncomfortable,” said Kat Reynolds as she spoke before the capacity crowd at the Contemporary Art Museum on September 22. The panel of artists and educators—who spoke during the Critical Conversations talk presented by Critical Mass for the Visual Arts—didn’t hold back from voicing their disdain about the art that hung in the very space where the discussion was taking place. (Read more from the St. Louis American.)

Who Gets the Credit for Collaboration?

The most important part of your tenure package at a research university is—shockingly!—your research. The tricky part of scholarly evaluation is collaboration. In a tenure case, the external letter writers will be asked to evaluate your contribution to the field, which includes evaluating how much you contributed to the collaborative projects listed on your CV. (Read more from Vitae.)

How to Systemize Your Workflow

Graduate students will argue that because our tasks are so varied and diverse, because research is so unpredictable, because the very nature of good scholarly work is its novelty, nothing we do can actually be systemized effectively. But I would argue that this is exactly where we need to systemize, so that we can spend minimal time on the rote things and spend the majority of our energy and cognitive cycles on the issues that actually matter. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Each week CAA News summarizes eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Zero Correlation between Evaluations and Learning

A number of studies suggest that student evaluations of teaching are unreliable due to various biases against instructors. Yet conventional wisdom remains that students learn best from highly rated instructors. What if the data backing up conventional wisdom were off? A new study suggests that past analyses linking student achievement to high student teaching evaluation ratings are flawed. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

How Colleges Should Adapt in a Networked Age

Perhaps you’ve stood in the front of a classroom, looked out on the room full of students distractedly checking email or Facebook, and thought: they’re just not that into this. When you were younger, students were more respectful of the professor at the podium. The change may indicate a bigger shift in attitudes toward college and authority figures in general. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Autocorrect: The Politics of Museum Collection Re-Hangs

In the past year, three major New York museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Brooklyn Museum—as well as a host of others around the world, have reinstalled their collection galleries in ways that privilege the alternative historical trajectory or new discovery over the transcendent masterpiece. (Read more from ARTnews.)

Back to Nature

By 2016 it is obvious that midcentury modernism is the defining design influence of the decade, with slim, sculpted furniture and thin, minimalist lines now ubiquitous. But a parallel trend has developed that revives a different aspect of the modernist aesthetic, just in time to address newer anxieties about our looming environmental apocalypse: the use of plants as design elements. (Read more from Curbed.)

How to Create Gender Equality in the Arts

Last week at the New School in New York, four female museum directors gazed up at an image of a woman sporting the all-caps slogan “The Future Is Female.” They were gathered to discuss the dearth of women in art-world leadership roles—and what it takes to get there. (Read more from Artsy.)

Self-Made Supermodels

In early 2015, near the end of her MFA in fine arts at Parsons, Leah Schrager set out on a project to create a celebrity by 2020—entirely via the internet—as an art practice. The celebrity she began to create was a hyper-sexy, cyber-savvy female rock star named Ona. (Read more from Rhizome.)

MoMA Will Make Thousands of Exhibition Images Available Online

After years of planning and digitizing, hundreds of thousands of documents and photographs in the Museum of Modern Art’s archives will now be available online. The digital-archive project will include almost 33,000 exhibition installation photographs, along with the pages of 800 out-of-print catalogs and more than 1,000 exhibition checklists, documents related to more than 3,500 exhibitions from 1929 through 1989. (Read more from the New York Times.)

How to Be a Better Networker

Your network starts locally with the people know from your lab or office, the floor you are on, your department, the journal club you attend, the lunchroom, and the like. Then, what do you do outside your training? Do you play a sport in a student league? Are you involved in a religious organization? Do you have kids and meet other parents through their care or activities? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)