CAA News Today
Work with CAA at the 2016 Annual Conference!
posted Dec 03, 2015
Working as a projectionist, room monitor, or registration attendant at CAA’s 104th Annual Conference, taking place February 3–6, 2016, in Washington, DC, is a great way to save on conference expenses. CAA encourages students, emerging professionals, and any interested CAA members—especially those in the Washington, DC, area—to apply for service. Students should check to see if their schools and universities are CAA institutional members as institutional membership now includes the benefit of specially discounted student memberships.
Projectionists
CAA seeks applications for projectionists for conference program sessions. Successful applicants are paid $12 per hour and receive complimentary conference registration. Projectionists are required to work a minimum of four 2½-hour program sessions, from Wednesday, February 3 to Saturday, February 6; they must also attend a training meeting on Wednesday morning at 7:30 AM (total of twelve hours minimum). Projectionists must be familiar with digital projectors. Please send a two-page CV and a brief letter of interest to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs. Deadline extended: January 4, 2016.
Room Monitors
CAA needs room monitors for two Career Services mentoring programs (the Artists’ Portfolio Review and Career Development Mentoring), several offsite sessions, and other conference events, to be held from Wednesday, February 3 to Saturday, February 6; they must also attend a training meeting on Wednesday morning at 7:30 AM. Successful candidates are paid $12 per hour and receive complimentary conference registration. Room monitors are required to work a minimum of twelve hours, checking in participants and facilitating the work of the mentors. Please send a two-page CV and a brief letter of interest to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs. Deadline extended: January 4, 2016.
Registration Attendants
CAA seeks registration attendants to work in the registration area at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC, to be held from Tuesday evening, February 2 to Saturday, February 6. Duties registration attendants must attend a training meeting on Tuesday afternoon, February 2 (between 3:30 and 5:00 PM). Successful candidates are paid $12 per hour and receive complimentary conference registration. Registration attendants are required to work a minimum of twelve hours, registering conference participants, checking membership statuses, and monitoring registration compliance in various session rooms. Please send a two-page CV and a brief letter of interest to Katie Apsey, CAA manager of programs. Deadline extended: January 4, 2016.
All candidates must be US citizens or permanent US residents.
Image: Working the registration booths at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York (photograph by Bradley Marks)
Responses to the Trigger-Warnings Survey
posted Dec 02, 2015
This past spring the National Coalition Against Censorship worked with the Modern Language Association and CAA to produce an online survey of their members regarding trigger warnings and the pressures on instructors. While the survey was not scientific, the over eight hundred responses received offer a bird’s eye view of the debate. Here are some responses to the survey results:
Catherine Rampell, “Young Fogies: Modern Illiberalism Is Led by Students,” Washington Post, November 30, 2015.
Colleen Flaherty, “Trigger Warning Skepticism,” Inside Higher Ed, December 2, 2015.
Robby Soave, “How Trigger Warnings Protect Religious Dogma in the Classroom,” Reason, December 1, 2015.
Tyler Kingkade, “The Prevailing Narrative on Trigger Warnings Is Just Plain Wrong,” Huffington Post, December 1, 2015.
Benjamin Wermund, “Do ‘Trigger Warnings’ Harm Academic Freedom? Most Educators Think So,” Chronicle of Higher Education, December 1, 2015.
College Fix Staff, “Three in Five Professors Say Trigger Warnings Pose a Threat to Academic Freedom,” College Fix, December 1, 2015.
Leah Libresco, “Most Professors Fear, But Don’t Face, Trigger Warnings,” Five Thirty Eight, December 10, 2015.
Jesse Singal, “Is There Any Evidence Trigger Warnings Are Actually a Big Deal?,” Science of Us, December 6, 2015.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Dec 02, 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 Artists and the March into the Museum
After decades of spotty acquisitions, undernourished scholarship, and token exhibitions, American museums are rewriting the history of twentieth-century art to include black artists in a more visible and meaningful way than ever before, playing historical catch-up at full tilt, followed by collectors who are rushing to find the most significant works before they are out of reach. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Can Art Exist on Social Media?
The arrival of a new passport is not usually newsworthy. But in July 2015, when the Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei posted a photo of himself with his new passport to Instagram, the world responded with barely contained excitement. The story was covered by the New York Times, CNN, and Time, among others. (Read more from Apollo.)
Carnegie Museum Computer Program Collects Every Detail on Its 30,098 Artworks
Elysa, a computer-software program named for Andrew Carnegie’s housekeeper, cleans up and standardizes information already known about 30,098 artworks in the Carnegie Museum of Art collection. Elysa (pronounced Eliza) breaks apart a paragraph packed with names and dates and organizes it into a format that computers can manipulate or turn into a map. (Read more from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.)
Will Video Kill the Lecturing Star?
You may have heard about the flipped classroom approach, in which lectures are viewed at home and class time is used for discussion, project work, and other practical exercises. You may also have been wondering whether to bother with it, and how it actually would work in practice. (Read more from the Guardian.)
Google Steps Up to Defend Fair Use, Will Fund YouTubers’ Legal Defenses
After years of missteps, blunders, and disasters in which YouTube users have been censored through spurious copyright claims or had their accounts deleted altogether, Google has announced an amazing, new, user-friendly initiative through which it will fund the legal defense of YouTube creators who are censored by bad-faith copyright-infringement claims. (Read more from Boing Boing.)
The New Art-World Math: What It Really Costs to Run a Gallery
Pity the poor art dealer. Not a phrase you hear a lot in an industry for which the stereotype is of jet setting and high living. But veteran art dealers report that some big things have changed to make it more difficult, and less profitable, to run an art gallery—even in what’s been a booming market for contemporary art. (Read more from the New York Observer.)
Where Is the Union for Arts Admin Workers?
Contrary to what you might expect from a New England–born Irish American whose descendants worked on railroads, pubs, and politics, I was raised with a healthy ambivalence toward unions. But having worked in nonprofits and the arts since before I was legally able, I’ve started to think that there might be some value in bringing the camaraderie and collective bargaining of unions into the arts, specifically on the administrative side. (Read more from HowlRound.)
Art Critics Have Ignored the Condition of Artworks for Too Long
Judging the quality of an artwork must always involve some appreciation of its current condition. This is not to say that an artist’s reputation should be defined by the injuries their work may have suffered over the centuries—although an understanding of the endurance of materials might well be one mark of artistic success. Rather, anyone who enjoys looking closely at works of art should always be conscious that they are unlikely to be presented as they were originally intended or achieved by the artist. (Read more from Apollo.)
American Scholarly Societies Joint Statement on “Campus Carry” Legislation
posted Dec 01, 2015
The undersigned learned societies are deeply concerned about the impact of Texas’s new Campus Carry law on freedom of expression in Texas universities. The law, which was passed earlier this year and takes effect in 2016, allows licensed handgun carriers to bring concealed handguns into buildings on Texas campuses. Our societies are concerned that the Campus Carry law and similar laws in other states introduce serious safety threats on college campuses with a resulting harmful effect on students and professors.
American Academy of Religion
American Anthropological Association
American Antiquarian Society
American Association for the History of Medicine
American Folklore Society
American Historical Association
American Musicological Society
American Philosophical Association
American Political Science Association
American Studies Association
American Society for Aesthetics
American Society for Environmental History
American Sociological Association
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Association of American Geographers
College Art Association
Latin American Studies Association
Law and Society Association
Medieval Academy of America
Middle East Studies Association
Modern Language Association
National Communication Association
National Council on Public History
Oral History Association
Society for American Music
Society of Architectural Historians
Society of Biblical Literature
Society for Ethnomusicology
World History Association
CAA President, DeWitt Godfrey, Releases Statement on Ashgate Acquisition
posted Dec 01, 2015
CAA acknowledges the concern of many of its members regarding the acquisition of Ashgate by Informa, the parent company of Taylor & Francis. The Ashgate art and humanities publications series have been a critically important venue for art history and critical scholarship because of their high quality production. Ashgate’s art and humanities series have also increased in value as the opportunities for scholarly monograph publishing diminishes. CAA has conveyed the concerns to Taylor & Francis that the high quality of the editorial process at Ashgate be maintained by Taylor & Francis and the art and humanities series continue to publish as fully as in the past.
Fall 2015 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted Dec 01, 2015
This fall, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of seven books in art history and visual culture through the Millard Meiss Publication Fund. Thanks to the generous bequest of the late Prof. Millard Meiss, CAA gives these grants to support the publication of scholarly books in art history and related fields.
The seven Meiss grantees for fall 2015 are:
- Monica Amor, Theories of the Nonobject: Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, 1944–1968, University of California Press
- Benjamin Anderson, Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art, Yale University Press
- Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art and Textile Politics since the 1970s, University of Chicago Press
- Ivan Drpic, Epigram, Art, and Devotion in Later Byzantium, Cambridge University Press
- Frances Guerin, The Truth Is Always Grey: Painting from Grisaille to Gerhard Richter, University of Minnesota Press
- Laura Kalba, Color in the Age of Impressionism: Commerce, Technology, and Art, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Yun Chiahn Sena, From Archaism to Antiquarianism: Antiquity in Song Culture, University of Washington Press
Books eligible for Meiss grants must already be under contract with a publisher and on a subject in the visual arts or art history. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
Fall 2015 Recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award
posted Nov 30, 2015
CAA has announced the five recipients of the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award for fall 2015. Thanks to a grant of $60,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, CAA is supporting the work of emerging authors who are publishing monographs on the history of art and related subjects.
The five Meiss/Mellon grantees for fall 2015 are:
- Anastasia Aukeman, Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association, University of California Press
- Mari Dumett, Corporate Imaginations: Fluxus Strategies for Living, University of California Press
- Namiko Kunimoto, Anxious Bodies: Gender and Nation in Postwar Art, University of Minnesota Press
- Miya Lippit, Aesthetic Life: The Artistic Discouse of Beauty in Modern Japan, Harvard University Press
- Allison Morehead, Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form, Pennsylvania State University Press
The purpose of the Meiss/Mellon subventions is to reduce the financial burden that authors carry when acquiring images for publication, including licensing and reproduction fees for both print and online publications.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Nov 25, 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.
Regulating Art That Offends
Almost three months after a racially charged art project stirred controversy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, administrators, faculty members, and students are still deliberating whether to adopt guidelines for public art on campus. At the root of the debate is a series of signs reading “White Only” and “Black Only” that appeared mysteriously and suddenly around campus in September, eliciting fear and shock from students. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Permission to Fail
An artist girlfriend and I used to go to galleries and see shows together. Sometimes when she looked at a piece she would say, “Oh, that’s something I did in art school.” After a while it dawned on me that much of what she dismissed as student exercises—gambits she figured she’d outgrown—were things I liked. I started to think that she had inadvertently taught me, if not a definition of good art, then at least a kind of rule of thumb for identifying it in the field. (Read more from the Nation.)
Free and Easy? DIY Universities
Scholars dissatisfied with their university administrations might ponder the case of the American Marxist academic Allen Krebs, who cofounded two “free universities” on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In 1965, after a falling-out with Adelphi University, where he was assistant professor of sociology, Krebs helped open the Free University of New York, one of the most successful of the first wave of free universities that swept across North America and Western Europe in the 1960s. (Read more from Times Higher Education.)
A Body of Work
I once gave a lecture on Jack Goldstein, an artist synonymous with the Pictures Generation and postmodernism. Others also associate him with romantic failure, with his “disappearance” from the art world in the 1990s and his suicide in 2003. After the talk concluded, an art historian I respect asked me if I thought Goldstein was “a great artist.” I was caught off guard and fumbled for a response. Eventually, I said with some hesitation, “I don’t know.” (Read more from the Brooklyn Rail.)
Our Designers Talk Book Covers
Don’t judge a book by its cover,” the popular adage goes. But, as humans, we often do just that. In this week’s blog post, as part of our 2015 AAUP blog tour, our book designers (Nancy Ovedovitz, design director; James Johnson, senior designer; Sonia Shannon, senior designer; and Mary Valencia, senior designer) discuss the design and creation of book covers. (Read more from Yale Books Unbound.)
Turning a Big-Box Store into an Artist’s Playground
Upon entering a big-box department store, many shoppers fall into a zombielike trance, focusing only on what they need to purchase. Carson Davis Brown felt a bit like that while in the automotive aisle of a Meijer store in Michigan. He was texting with a friend when he suddenly looked down the aisle. “I noticed everything was yellow,” he said. “I did a double take.” (Read more from Slate.)
What If I’ve Never Taught Solo?
I’m always dismayed to hear about departments that don’t let graduate students teach, because the experience of running your own class is an essential element of a competitive record. Sure it’s possible to get a tenure-track job without that experience but it is much, much harder. (Read more from Vitae.)
Going Rogue: Authenticating Warhol after the Board’s Disbanding
This month Richard Polsky launched a Warhol authentication service. It’s a task that is both necessary and risky, given the lengthy, and very costly, legal battles the artist’s prolific output has sparked over the years. After a series of suits resulted in a reported $7 million in legal fees, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which manages the artist’s estate, dissolved the board in 2012. (Read more from Blouin Artinfo.)
2015 Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant Winners
posted Nov 25, 2015
CAA is pleased to announce six 2015 recipients of the annual Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, established in 2005. Thanks to a generous grant from the Wyeth Foundation, these awards are given annually to publishers to support the publication of one or more book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects. For this grant program, “American art” is defined as art created in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The six grantees for 2015 are:
- Anastasia Aukeman, Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association, University of California Press
- Mary Campbell, Civil Saints: Polygamy, Pornography, and Mormon Citizenship in the Work of Charles Ellis Johnson, University of Chicago Press
- Dale Allen Gyure, Serenity and Delight: The Architecture of Minoru Yamasaki, Yale University Press
- Jessica Horton, Places to Stand: Native American Modernisms on an Undivided Earth, Duke University Press
- Rebecca Peabody, Consuming Stories: Kara Walker and the Imagining of American Race, University of California Press
- Nizan Shaked, The Synthetic Proposition: Conceptualism and the Political Referent in Contemporary Art, Manchester University Press
Eligible for the grant are book-length scholarly manuscripts in the history of American art, visual studies, and related subjects that have been accepted by a publisher on their merits but cannot be published in the most desirable form without a subsidy. Authors must be current CAA members. Please review the application guidelines for more information.
What’s All This about Trigger Warnings?
posted Nov 18, 2015
Survey reveals a complex picture: threats to academic freedom are not just about “political correctness.”
If the headlines are correct, college students everywhere are demanding professors provide so-called “trigger warnings” to flag material that might make them feel uncomfortable, and in some cases to allow students to avoid the material. If this is happening widely, the free speech implications are enormous: A broad range of works, from a documentary about sexual assault to an historical account of slavery, could be considered “triggering,” along with the possibility that many professors would steer clear of potentially controversial work.
But how prevalent are these demands? Is a resurgent tide of political correctness threatening higher education, or are the media jumping to conclusions?
To shed some light, NCAC worked with the Modern Language Association and the College Art Association this spring on an online survey of their members. While the survey is not scientific, the over 800 responses we received offer a birds’ eye view of the debate over trigger warnings, and the pressures on instructors.
The survey finds that formal university trigger policies are extremely rare: Less than one percent of respondents say their schools have them. But there is abundant anecdotal evidence suggesting that something is going on. It appears to be a bottom-up phenomenon: Students make complaints to individual professors or administrators, and instructors—many of whom are reasonably nervous about job security. As one survey respondent put it, “After teaching a course for the first time, a student complained in the anonymous evaluation. Ever since, I verbally include a trigger warning at the start of each semester.”
Fifteen percent of respondents reported that students had requested trigger warnings in their courses, while over half reported that they had voluntarily provided warnings for course materials, with 23 percent saying they have offered them “several times” or “regularly.”
So who is doing the complaining? In much of the media commentary, the focus is on left-leaning students using trigger warnings to chill speech they find offensive. One widely-read essay on the subject was titled, “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.” While this is certainly happening, and many respondents reported sensitivities to content depicting rape and sexual assault, the survey paints a more complex picture. Contrary to conventional thinking, warnings are sought by both conservative and liberal students. “I used trigger warnings to warn about foul or sexual language, sexual content, or violence in order to allow our very conservative students to feel more in control of the material,” wrote one instructor. Another teacher was aware of “religious objections to nude models in studio courses” and “homoerotic content in art history.” Another teacher noted the use of trigger warnings “because some students were upset by the realization that certain artists were homosexuals.”
Another common theme is that it is impossible “to be able to predict which topics will be problematic for students, or will ‘trigger’ a response.” “I’ve had students want pretty detailed and specific trigger warnings for, well, everything…,” including violent imagery in a horror film class. Reported complaints concern spiders, indigenous artifacts, “fatphobia,” and more.
Many respondents draw a distinction between “trigger warnings” and course or content descriptions. The latter are widely accepted as ways to convey information about the scope, substance and requirements of a given course. As many instructors have pointed out, offering students information about course materials does not necessarily flag content as disturbing or offensive, or offer students an opportunity to avoid it, but simply provides an explanation about what material will be taught.
The strongest findings in the survey are that instructors believe that trigger warnings, if widely used, would threaten academic freedom and inquiry. Nearly half of respondents (45 percent) think trigger warnings have or will have a negative effect on classroom dynamics; on the broader question of academic freedom, 62 percent see a possible negative effect.
Those who oppose warnings say they reinforce taboos, infantilize students, “tend to impede conversation,” “stifle meaningful discussion,” and send a message to students “about what it’s ok for them to get upset about.” In contrast, supporters say they build trust and “create a positive classroom environment,” show respect for the “individual needs of students,” create “a positive and safe space for dialogue,” prepare students “to engage with the material in meaningful ways,” and prevent them from feeling “blindsided.”
The survey revealed that many instructors are deeply concerned about their students’ wellbeing, and how best to fulfill the mission of higher education. And the demand for trigger warnings may reflect a desire by students to be more engaged in their education and their communities, which has positive aspects. However, the trick is to ensure that such an interest is not expressed in ways that preclude discussion, debate, and even disagreement.
Reprinted from Censorship News, No. 123 (Fall 2015), National Coalition Against Censorship www.ncac.org.