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.

Here Are the Guerrilla Girls on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

The anonymous feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last week and talked about gender inequality in the art world. The collective is known for wearing gorilla masks and using the names of deceased female artists as monikers. Kathe, Zubeida, and Frida were the members that spoke with Colbert. (Read more from ARTnews.)

How Advocates of African American Art Are Advancing Racial Equality in the Art World

Only a small group of African Americans occupy curatorial positions at mainstream museums, relatively few African American artists have been given major solo museum shows, and works by nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American artists are undervalued by the art market relative to those by white artists of equal standing. Change doesn’t come organically, however. It takes individuals. (Read more from Artsy.)

New York Dealers Cannot Afford to Represent Emerging Artists

For visitors to New York art galleries who want to know why the prices are so high—or for artists who want to exhibit their work in those galleries—part of the blame may lie with the landlord, or with the real-estate market as a whole. Rents are high, averaging $100 to $200 per square foot in Chelsea and $80 to $120 on the Lower East Side. (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Help Desk: Self-Promotion

I’m an artist who just got a solo show at a little gallery but have no idea how to promote it. I didn’t go to art school and don’t have a huge group of people to invite. I’m lost on how to market the show. Where do I start? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

320 Hours: Slow Looking and Visitor Engagement with El Greco

By the time the painting returned to its home in Cleveland, El Greco’s Holy Family with Saint Mary Magdalene and I had spent 320 hours and four months together. As an interpretation assistant for the Portland Art Museum, I was in the gallery four days a week, interacting with visitors, experimenting with interpretive strategies, and reflecting on this four-hundred-year-old painting. This experience gave me room to experiment with visitor engagement, changed how I approach the act of looking, and influenced my teaching outside the museum. (Read more from Art Museum Teaching.)

How to Explain Pictures to a Difficult Date

We live in an age when “kitsch” almost defies definition but is tossed around with great abandon: If Jeff Koons can turn tacky garden sculptures and gift-shop figurines into gazillion-dollar collectibles, lauded by a fair number of critics, what then becomes of kitsch? (Read more from Vasari21.)

Getting Your Citations in Order

Failure to acknowledge is not as big a sin as outright plagiarism, but there is something disconcerting about it. Two related problems necessarily task academics. One confronts those who enter a new field: how to make sure to build on already existing developments and avoid unnecessary wheel reinvention. The answer—as all research students are told—is to do the desk research first. (Read more from Times Higher Education.)

Facing an Impossible Choice

Maybe the problem with academics is that we take too much pride in our jobs. No doubt that sounds counterintuitive: How can pride in our work be a bad thing? It can when it inspires far too many PhDs to labor willingly for far too long in contingent positions. (Read more from Vitae.)

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.

Should Art Grants Be Awarded to Artists Who Don’t Need the Money?

When talking to the founders of the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award in Seattle, I was trying to raise a general discussion around the fact that many arts funders don’t take financial need into account when deciding who gets their money. I’m not talking about making need the decisive factor. I’m talking about making it one factor among several. (Read more from the Stranger.)

The Most Relevant Art Today Is Taking Place outside the Art World

When artists operate outside the gallery space, whether because their work functions best there or because they are forced to, they are both creating valuable art and making the limitations of traditional art institutions visible—physically, historically, and conceptually. Perhaps such work can even change those institutions, those structures of looking. (Read more from Artsy.)

The Robots Are Coming

Artists as diverse as Rachel Whiteread, Oscar Murillo, and Yayoi Kusama are beginning to use the high-tech fabrication methods once available to only the most commercially successful artists. Lower-cost robots that mimic an artist’s arm movements and joints are starting to replace the pricey computer-numerical-control machines that Jeff Koons uses to produce his sleek, industrial aesthetic. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

The Secret to All Great Art Forgeries

In A Forger’s Tale, the convicted forger Shaun Greenhalgh reveals that he drew Leonardo da Vinci’s La Bella Principessa, which has been valued upwards of $100 million. Greenhalgh even admits that he modeled the subject after a supermarket checkout girl. If his claims are true, how did this forgery go unnoticed for so long? How did it pass the sniff tests of so many art historians and purported experts? (Read more from the New Republic.)

College Degree Gap Grows Wider for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos

The racial gap in who’s graduating from college has widened since 2007, a new report shows. While more blacks and Latinos are graduating from college now, the percentage of whites graduating has grown even faster. About 33 percent of African American adults had at least a two-year college degree in 2015, up from about 28 percent in 2007. For Latinos, that figure grew to about 23 percent from 19 percent, while whites grew to 47 percent from 41 percent. (Read more from the Hechinger Report.)

Translating Research into Practice

During the past twenty years, college and university faculty have begun to utilize several areas of the learning sciences, including cognitive psychology, to inform pedagogy. Much of this work has happened in ways that have helped our profession to more effectively teach and our students to more effectively learn. However, we still have much work to do if we claim that we have a well-developed set of tools that can be applied across disciplines. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

Helen Molesworth’s Permanent-Collection Show at MOCA Is Upending the Story of Art

Enter the permanent collection galleries of any museum of modern and contemporary art in the United States and it’s likely you’ll lay eyes on a familiar story: the muscular narrative of the Abstract Expressionists attacking their canvases, continuing through the pathways of 1960s Pop and 1970s Minimalism before landing at the Neoexpressionism of the 1980s. Pay a visit to Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, however, and you will see that story turned on its head. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)

What Money Can Buy

The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money. (Read more from the New Yorker.)

The College Art Association advances the highest standards of instruction, knowledge and practice in the visual arts to stimulate intellectual curiosity and advance skills that enrich the individual and society. Below is a sampling of CAA’s recent work on Fair Use, Standards and Guidelines in the Visual Arts, international scholarship programs, publishing grants, and professional development fellowships for artists and scholars. For more information and updates, visit www.collegeart.org.

CAA Project on Fair Use in the Visual Arts

• Conceived with guidance of over 60 members of the CAA governing community
• Directly reached nearly 2,000 people through talks and webinars
• Publication of groundbreaking Code of Best Practices in the Visual Arts
• Endorsed and supported by the American Library Association, Art Libraries Society of North America, Association of Art Museum Curators, Association of College and Research Libraries Association of Research Libraries, Society of Architectural Historians, Visual Resources Association, American Alliance of Museums, and Association of Art Museum Directors

Standards and Guidelines for the Visual Arts

• Development of workplace practices, pedagogical guidelines, official statements, and establishment of professional ethics in the visual arts
• From 2014-2015, CAA issued the following Standards and Guidelines:

1. Statement On Terminal Degree Programs in The Visual Arts and Design (2015)
2. Guidelines for CAA Interviews (2015)
3. Guidelines for Part-Time Professional Employment (2015)
4. Standards for Professional Placement (2015)
5. Standards for the Practice of Art History (2014)
6. Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts, CAA (2015)
7. Fine Art Print Publication Guidelines for Artists (2015)
8. Standards for the Practice of Art History (2014)
9. General Principles for Academic Arts Administrators (2015)

Publishing Toward the Future

• Sharp increase in readership after co-publishing contract with Taylor & Francis

1. 2014-15 Art Bulletin full text downloads: 37,631
2. 2014-15 Art Journal full text downloads: 29,891
3. CAA Reviews website visits: 88,131

• Joint Task Force between CAA and the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) to developing guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship in art and architectural history.
• Art Journal Open launches new features including Bookshelves of art historians, artists, curators, and designers and discussions between curators and artists
• Graduate Programs in the Visual Arts published in two volumes for the fifth consecutive year

CAA International Reach

• In its first four years the CAA-Getty International Program has had 75 Participants from 37 Countries hosted by 46 CAA members
• Launch of the International News Desk on CAA website
• Organized CAA Member International Tour to Cuba for the Havana Biennial
• Expansion of membership to art critics, art historians, and artists based abroad

Increasing Digital Footprint

• 2014-15 visitors to CAA website over 6.5 million
• Continued growth in social media reach: Facebook (6,462 likes) and Twitter (13.7K)
• Launch of Instagram account and Flickr image archive
• Launch of Social Media Wall for 2016 Annual Conference

Grants Awarded to CAA

• CAA projects and initiatives funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Getty Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Milton and Sally Avery Foundation, and Elizabeth A. Sackler Museum Educational Trust

Fellowships, Grants, and Support Offered by CAA

• CAA offered to artists, authors, and art historians grants and fellowships including the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award, CAA Getty International Program, the Millard Meiss Publications Fund, the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Grant, Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant, CAA Professional Development Fellowships, and travel grants supporting graduate students and international members of CAA.