CAA News Today
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Jun 03, 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.
IIE Launches Program to Assist Threatened Artists
The Institute of International Education will soon launch a program to save the lives and work of artists who face persecution in their home countries. The new Artist Protection Fund, a three-year pilot program supported by a $2.79 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will make life-saving fellowship grants to threatened artists from any field of artistic endeavor and place them at host universities and arts centers in countries where they can safely continue their work and plan for their future. (Read more from the Institute of International Education.)
Protecting Priceless Art from Natural Disasters
The reviews of the new design of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York have been glowing. But the most intriguing feature might be one that’s gone largely unnoticed: its custom flood-mitigation system, which was designed halfway through the museum’s construction, in the aftermath of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, when more than five million gallons of water flooded the site. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
Taking the Measure of Sexism: Facts, Figures, and Fixes
Despite encouraging signs of women’s improved status and visibility in the art world, there are still major systemic problems. Do not misunderstand me: women artists are in a far better position today than they were forty-five years ago, when Linda Nochlin wrote her landmark essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Access to “high art” education, to which women have historically been denied, is now possible for many with financial means. Moreover, the institutional power structures that Nochlin argued made it “impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius,” have been shifting. (Read more from ARTnews.)
62 Women Share Their Secrets to Art World Success: Part One
What are the secrets to a successful career in the art world? Artnet News asked sixty-two women in the upper echelons of museums, galleries, art public-relations firms, and art nonprofits to tell us what they’ve learned over the course of their careers, and to offer their advice for women looking to break into the business. (Read more from Artnet News.)
62 Women Share Their Secrets to Art World Success: Part Two
What are the secrets to a successful career in the art world? Artnet News asked sixty-two women in the upper echelons of museums, galleries, art public-relations firms, and art nonprofits to tell us what they’ve learned over the course of their careers, and to offer their advice for women looking to break into the business. (Read more from Artnet News.)
The Rise of the Private Art “Museum”
In the heart of Berlin stands a windowless concrete bunker so awesomely ugly that, when you see it, you instinctively avert your gaze. It is heavy, gray, and shrapnel-pocked, and has no signage to explain its protean history. Designed by the Nazi architect Karl Bonatz, the bunker was built in 1942 as an air-raid shelter for Germans. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the building was appropriated for use first as an avant-garde performance space and later as a techno club. In 2003, Christian and Karen Boros bought the building to display a portion of their sizable collection of contemporary art. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Looking for Creativity in Brains Will Take More Creativity
About a decade and a half ago, the neuroscience world got super stoked about a sexy new way to look at living brains: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Now, fMRI is still a great tool—just as long as you’re applying it to questions that it can actually answer. The problem is, many questions that can be answered simply with fMRI data have, by virtue of being simple, already been answered. That means any successive studies done with fMRI have to meet a much, much higher bar. (Read more from Wired.)
Digitally Divided
There’s nothing like being without the internet for a few days to realize how much I don’t miss it, at least occasionally. But it also makes me realize how much I assume when I have regular access. I’ve been vacationing in parts of the country where our cell phones can’t reach a signal. It’s a good time to relax, listen to the wind in the trees, take long walks with no particular destination in mind, but you can’t pick up the latest news, keep your email clutter cut down to size, or check tomorrow’s weather, all things that I take for granted normally. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Changes Coming to the Annual Meeting!
posted Jun 02, 2015
Suzanne Preston Blier, Vice President for the Annual Conference, is heading the CAA Task Force on the Annual Conference and, along with other members of this group, she is seeking suggestions from CAA members on the kinds of changes that you would like to see.
Among the suggestions that have already been initiated is the following:
CAA has decided to return to its earlier policy of allowing members to annually submit proposals, present a paper, or chair a panel. This is a change from the every-other-year format that had been followed in recent years. Our goal is to keep members engaged and participating in CAA’s Annual Conference on a yearly basis.
Please send your suggestions to nyoffice@collegeart.org.
Support CAA’s Publications Fund
posted Jun 02, 2015
This year, CAA’s journals made impressive use of their new digital platforms to provide access to their incredibly rich and influential back archive, engage an ever-broadening international audience, and explore new multimedia forms of scholarly publication. These digital efforts augment and support the journals’ longstanding mission to deliver the world’s leading scholarship in the visual arts in forms that engage the field at its most exciting frontiers while maintaining a commitment to the rigorous standards for which they are known.
We invite you to support our mission of advancing the highest standards of intellectual engagement in the arts by making a tax-deductible gift to the Publications Fund today.
Here are some recent highlights from CAA publications:
In The Art Bulletin:
- The long-form essay remains the cornerstone of the journal. Recent authors have included Marvin Trachtenberg on new elements in the history of the basilica of S. Lorenzo in Florence, Mark Rosen on Pietro Tacca’s sculptural portraits of slaves on a seventeenth-century monument in Livorno, Susan Siegfried’s exploration of the intersection of the classical ideal and post-Revolutionary fashion in a painting by Marie-Denise Viller, and Bridget Alsdorf on the figure of the gawker in woodcut illustrations by Félix Vallotton for this novel The Murderous Life
- For the “Whither Art History?” series, prominent art historians from around the world respond to that very inquiry about the direction of the discipline, among them Richard W. Hill Sr. on the art of being indigenous and Moye Okediji on the nature of African art
- Reviews of books on a wide range of topics, from prehistoric visual culture, to eighteenth-century eye miniatures, to humor and politics in recent German art
In Art Journal:
- The journal’s essays have recently featured Anna C. Chave on the career of Carl Andre, Luis M. Castañeda on mid-century art in Haiti, and Kenneth R. Allan on artists influenced by the thinking of Marshall McLuhan
- An artist’s project by Conrad Bakker delved into the library of Robert Smithson, and the artist Brian Molanphy offered a freewheeling annotated bibliography of ceramic art
- Art Journal Open, the journal’s independent website, has lately featured the interview format, with the artists William Lamson, Kate Gilmore, and the art duo robbinschilds each speaking about recent work with the curator Dina Deitsch, and Rudy Lemcke speaking with Tina Takemoto
- Reviews of new books on artists as diverse as Adrian Piper, Andrew Wyeth, and Andy Warhol; on Panamericanism during the Cold War; and on reevaluating modern artists who eschewed abstraction
In caa.reviews (now fully open access!):
- Continual publication reviews on diverse topics and geographic regions, including reviews of books: Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1660–1760 by Chi-ming Yang, Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba, edited by Alejandro de la Fuente, and Mio Wakita’s Staging Desires: Japanese Femininity in Kusakabe Kimbei’s Nineteenth-Century Souvenir Photography; and exhibitions: Treasures from Korea: Arts and Culture of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392–1910, Passion and Virtuosity: Hendrick Goltzius and the Art of Engraving, and A Royal Passion: Queen Victoria and Photography
These highly regarded journals reach tens of thousands of readers around the world and serve as essential resources to those working in the visual arts—none of which would be possible without your support. Contributors who give at a level of $250 or higher are prominently acknowledged in the publication they support for four consecutive issues, as well as on the publication’s website for one year, through CAA News, and in the Annual Conference’s convocation booklet. On behalf of the scholars, critics, and artists who publish in the journals, we thank you for your continued commitment to maintaining a strong and spirited forum for the visual-arts community.
With best regards,
Gail Feigenbaum
Vice President for Publications
Spring 2015 Recipients of the Millard Meiss Publication Fund
posted Jun 01, 2015
This spring, CAA awarded grants to the publishers of ten 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 ten Meiss grantees for spring 2015 are:
- Marisa Anne Bass, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity, Princeton University Press
- George Bent, Public Painting and Visual Culture in Early Republican Florence, Cambridge University Press
- Sarah Gordon, Indecent Exposures: Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion Nudes, Yale University Press
- Anne Helmreich, Art and Science: The Quest for Truth to Nature in British Photography and Painting, 1839–1914, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Jeehee Hong, Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400, University of Hawai‘i Press
- Dorothy Ko, The Social Life of Inkstones: Craftsmen and Scholars in Early Qing China, University of Washington Press
- Catha Paquette, At the Crossroads: Patronage and Censorship of Diego Rivera in the 1930s, University of Texas Press
- Eric Ramírez-Weaver, Saving Science: Capturing the Heavens in Carolingian Manuscripts, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Oscar E. Vázquez, The End Again: Degeneration and Visual Culture in Modern Spain, Pennsylvania State University Press
- Robert Williams, Raphael and the Modernity of Italian Renaissance Art, Cambridge University 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.
caa.reviews Publishes Dissertations Completed and In Progress for 2014
posted May 29, 2015
caa.reviews recently published the authors and titles of doctoral dissertations in art history and visual studies—both completed and in progress—from American and Canadian institutions for calendar year 2014. You may browse by listing date or by subject matter. Each entry identifies the student’s name, dissertation title, school, and advisor.
Each institution granting the PhD in art history and/or visual studies submits dissertation titles once a year to CAA for publication. The caa.reviews list also includes dissertations completed and in progress between 2002 and 2013, making basic information about their topics available through web searches.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 27, 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.
Does Color Even Exist?
Color perception is an ancient and active philosophical problem. It’s an instance of the wider category of sensory perception, but since the color spectrum fits on a single line, it has always been of particular interest. In her new book Outside Color, M. Chirimuuta gives a serendipitously timed history of the puzzle of color in philosophy. To read Outside Color as a layman feels like being let in on a shocking secret: neither scientists nor philosophers know for sure what color is. (Read more from the New Republic.)
Help Desk: Support for Artists
I espouse fair-labor initiatives such as W.A.G.E. to pay artists. However, my own projects are often un- or underfunded; if a stipend covers a significant portion of my expenses, that seems like a success, even if I take a loss on my own time and labor. As a consequence I’m unable to pay myself, much less my collaborators, contributors, and volunteers. How do I navigate this paradox? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
A Few Good Reasons to Drop Out of Art School
Earlier this month, the first-year students in the MFA program in visual art at the University of Southern California announced that they were all dropping out. It was also a brave gesture—not heroic, but one made at a personal cost and resonant with the larger situation in art right now. The MFA is not only a prerequisite for teaching art but a marker of professional seriousness in the art world: if you want to get your work into the Whitney Biennial, so the conventional wisdom goes, you’re going to need a degree. Abandoning one on principle is no small thing. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
Racial and Ethnic Diversity in Arts Management: An Exposé and Guide
Are you tired? Rundown? Listless? Do you constantly meet the diversity quota in meetings? Well, if you answered, “yes” to these questions, you are not alone. I, too, suffer from only-one syndrome. I, too, am the person that everyone turns to when a question arises about “outreach” to people of color. As a student, intern, and employee in the field of arts administration, I have a desire to change my answers to “no,” which has sparked my commitment to promoting systemic change in performing arts organizations through racial and ethnic diversity management and engagement. (Read more from HowlRound.)
Why We Should Let the Pantheon Crack
John Ochsendorf wants to tear down Rome’s iconic Pantheon. He wants to pull apart its two-thousand-year-old walls until its gorgeous dome collapses. Destroying it, he believes, is the best way to preserve it. But the Pantheon that Ochsendorf, a professor of engineering and architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has in mind to destroy is less than 20 inches high, and it’s made of 492 three-dimensionally-printed blocks. (Read more from Nautilus.)
This Is What Happens When You Slash Funding for Public Universities
On February 25, three University of Arizona graduate students had a meeting with Kelli Ward, a Republican state senator. They were lobbying against massive new cuts to state spending on higher education; the number being thrown around was $75 million. Under the state constitution, attending the university is supposed to be as “nearly free as possible,” but due to state budget cuts, tuition had increased more than 70 percent between 2008 and 2013 for in-state students—the severest hike in the country. (Read more from the Nation.)
Do Touch the Artwork at Prado’s Exhibit for the Blind
It’s a warning sign at art museums around the world: “Don’t touch the artwork.” But Spain’s famous Prado Museum is changing that, with an exhibit where visitors are not only allowed to touch the paintings—they’re encouraged to do so. The Prado has made three-dimensional copies of some of the most renowned works in its collection—including those by Goya, Velázquez, and El Greco—to allow blind people to feel them. (Read more from National Public Radio.)
I Know What You Need to Do This Summer
What should you do over the summer to prepare for the academic job market in the fall? In the next few months, you should aim to solidify all of the elements of your record that you can. That includes your dissertation if you are still ABD, as well as your publications, teaching, conferences, and references. Perhaps you might even do some initial research toward new projects. (Read more from Vitae.)
Final Webinars in Series on Fair Use
posted May 26, 2015
Register now for the next webinar in CAA’s series on fair use in the visual arts, meeting this Friday, May 29 at 1 PM EDT and the final review on Friday, June 5 at 1 PM EDT. Join the lead principal investigators of CAA’s new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, Patricia Aufderheide, university professor in the School of Communication at American University and Peter Jaszi, professor of law in the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University’s Washington College of Law, for an in-depth look at the Code’s section on fair use in museums and archives and a final review of the entire series. Registration for the live events is free and open to the public thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Video recordings of the webinars in this series are available for CAA members. To access, log into your account on collegeart.org and click on the “Webinars” tab in the left-hand navigation column. Recordings of each webinar in the series will be made available to members the week following the event.
CAA will issue Certificates of Participation to those who attend all five webinars in the series. Registration secures you a spot in all remaining webinars, however you may attend any number of the remaining webinars through this registration. The webinars will cover the following topics:
May 29, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in Museums and Archives
June 5, 2015, 1:00-2:00 PM (EDT): Fair Use in the Visual Arts: A Review
2015–16 Nominating Committee Members
posted May 21, 2015
CAA is pleased to announce the members of the 2015–16 Nominating Committee, which is charged with identifying and interviewing potential candidates for the Board of Directors and selecting the final slate of candidates for the membership’s vote. The committee members, their institutional affiliations, and their positions are:
- Charles A Wright, Western Illinois University, Vice President for Committees and Chair
- Constance Cortez, Texas Tech University and CAA Board Member
- Jesús Escobar, Northwestern University
- Peter M. Lukehart, National Gallery of Art
- Michael Mandiberg, College of Staten Island, City University of New York
- Jennifer Milam, University of Sydney and CAA Board Member
- Heghnar Watenpaugh, University of California, Davis
- Linda Downs, CAA Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer (ex officio)
The 2015–16 Nominating Committee chose the new members of the committee at its recent business meeting, held during the 2015 Annual Conference in New York in February. The Board of Directors also appointed four liaisons. CAA publishes a call for nominations and self-nominations for Nominating Committee service on the website in late fall of every year and publicizes it in CAA News. Please direct all queries regarding the committee to Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted May 20, 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.
Entire USC First-Year MFA Class Is Dropping Out
We are a group of seven artists who made the decision to attend USC Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program based on the faculty, curriculum, program structure, and funding packages. We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the school’s dismantling of each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies. In short, due to the university’s unethical treatment of its students, we, the entire incoming class of 2014, are dropping out of school and dropping back into our expanded communities at large. (Read more from Art and Education.)
Behind the Impasse That Led USC’s 2016 MFA Students to Withdraw in Protest
The graduate class of 2016 at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design has withdrawn in protest from the visual-arts program over administration and curriculum changes. The conflict stems from changes made to the program after students had already arrived on campus, as well as resignations by prominent faculty members. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)
The Conference Manifesto
We are weary of academic conferences. We are humanists who recognize very little humanity in the conference format and content. We have sat patiently and politely through talks read line by line in a monotone voice by a speaker who doesn’t look up once, wondering why we couldn’t have read the paper ourselves in advance with a much greater level of absorption. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Noodling on the Future of Conferences
May I just say, for the record, that I love love love the American Alliance of Museums annual meeting staff. They do a glorious job each year of pulling off the near impossible—decamping for a distant city to host a few thousand of our besties, orchestrating content, transportation, signage, A/V, food, drink, and the logistics of getting a couple hundred vendors in and out of a massive exhibit hall. They totally rock. But I’m a futurist. (Read more from the Center for the Future of Museums.)
The Machine Vision Algorithm Beating Art Historians at Their Own Game
Few areas of academic inquiry have escaped the influence of computer science and machine learning. But one of them is the history of art. The challenge of analyzing paintings, recognizing their artists, and identifying their style and content has always been beyond the capability of even the most advanced algorithms. That is now changing thanks to recent advances in machine learning based on approaches such as deep convolutional neural networks. (Read more from the MIT Technology Review.)
Thinking about Art Thinking
One of the problems we face when talking about art education is that we take the term “work of art” for granted. “Work” refers to labor as much as to an object, while “art” means the discipline in which this is performed, although it is also used as a laudatory adjective. In any case this divides people in two groups: those who make the objects, and those who appreciate them. Those who make them are subject to the criteria of meritocracy, and the educational system aims to distill the few that may rise to the top. (Read more from e-flux Journal.)
Should Graduate Students and Adjuncts Unionize for Better Pay?
Colleges have been cutting costs by using more nontenured instructors, including graduate student teaching assistants and adjuncts, instead of professors. They account for over half of teachers on college campuses. Both adjuncts and graduate instructors have been organizing for higher pay and employment benefits. But is unionization the answer? (Read more from the New York Times.)
Using Art Therapy to Open the Minds of Jihadists
Of all the problems therapists have been tasked with solving, altering the mindsets of committed jihadists is one of the toughest and most important. In Saudi Arabia, which has more experience with this problem than any other nation, they have found a simple tool provides invaluable assistance in this challenging process: paint brushes. (Read more from Pacific Standard.)
Updated Directory of Affiliated Societies
posted May 19, 2015
The Directory of Affiliated Societies, a comprehensive list of all eighty groups that have joined CAA as affiliate members, has just been updated. Please visit the directory to view a single webpage that includes the following information for each group: name, date of founding, size of membership, and annual dues; a brief statement on the society’s nature or purpose; and the names of officers and/or contacts for you to get more details about the groups or to join them. In addition, CAA links directly to each affiliated society’s homepage.