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.

W.A.G.E. Certification

Working Artists and the Greater Economy has launched W.A.G.E. Certification, a paradigm-shifting model for the remuneration of artistic labor in the nonprofit sector. W.A.G.E. Certification is a program that publicly recognizes nonprofit arts organizations that demonstrate a history of, and commitment to, voluntarily paying artist fees—it is also the first of its kind in the US that establishes a sector-wide minimum standard for compensation, as well as a clear set of guidelines and standards for the conditions under which artistic labor is contracted. (Read more from e-flux.)

Tenure Track Wisdom, Part 3

In the third of this series of faculty interviews, we hear from Steph Hinnershitz, who just started her second year as an assistant professor of history at Valdosta State University in southern Georgia. (Read more from Vitae.)

Indicting Higher Education in the Arts and Beyond

There’s one very clear take-away from the latest report released by the collective BFAMFAPhD: people who graduate with arts degrees regularly end up with a lot of debt and incredibly low prospects for earning a living as artists. Or, as they put it in the report, titled Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists, “the fantasy of future earnings in the arts cannot justify the high cost of degrees.” (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Unbound: The Politics of Scanning

The romanticized image of the scanner is based on the assumption that by scanning and uploading we make information available, and that that is somehow an invariably democratic act. Scanning has become synonymous with transparency and access. But does the document dump generate meaningful analysis, or make it seem insignificant? (Read more from Rhizome.)

Intentional Conferencing

Conferences are not cheap. They are exhausting and usually require you to travel. You are taking time away from work, which means risking feeling behind when you return. You arrive home sleep-deprived, information-overloaded, and struggling to play catch-up. So why do we go? We attend conferences to learn, network, and take new ideas back to our institutions. Does this always happen? (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Teaching and the University of Tomorrow

Last week, I attended the De Lange Conference held at Rice University every other year, this time on “Teaching in the University of Tomorrow.” The future-oriented theme had both intrigued me, and left me a little skeptical. But ultimately I was won over by the chance to attend, for the first time, a conference exclusively focused on teaching. I would be able to talk shop about learning and pedagogy. Like many other academics, I’m concerned about what the university of tomorrow might become. (Read more from Vitae.)

Everybody’s an Art Curator

This winter, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History will feature an exhibit of works relating to the ocean, with paintings and sculptures by established artists alongside works by local residents. According to a call for submissions, that includes not just watercolors of Pacific sunsets, but “that awesome GoPro footage you took while surfing” and “your two-year-old’s drawing of the beach that’s been on the fridge for five months.” Museums are increasingly outsourcing the curation of their exhibits to the public—sometimes even asking the crowd to contribute art, too. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)

Seeking a Postdoc

An advice seeker writes, “My adviser tells me not even to bother applying for postdocs—the competition is too intense. Is that true?” Of course you can apply for postdocs. Yes the competition is fierce, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. As you craft your application, make sure that it proves four key things: that your research is legitimate, necessary, and viable, and that it meets the needs (or advances the mission) of the hosting laboratory, department, campus, or program. (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.

An Interview with Jane Chu, Chairman of the NEA

Jane Chu was confirmed as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts this past June. She recently answered a few questions about the NEA’s priorities in relation to local arts agencies. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)

Study Shows That Recent Arts Alumni Are Resilient, Adaptable, and Involved

A study released by the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project shows that America’s most recent arts graduates are using skills learned in school combined with internship experiences to find work, forge careers, and engage their communities, despite higher student debt levels than older alumni. The report, Making It Work: The Education and Employment of Recent Arts Graduates, analyzes data from more than 88,000 arts alumni of all ages, with a particular focus on the 17,000 recent alumni—those who finished their undergraduate or graduate level degrees up to five years prior. (Read more from Indiana University Bloomington.)

Georgia State University’s Loss in “E-Reserves” Case Might Actually Be a Win for Librarians

Two weeks ago a federal appeals court ended that celebration by reversing the judge’s decision and sending the “e-reserves” case back to the lower court for further action. At a glance, the latest ruling looks like a loss for Georgia State University and its allies, and a win for three academic publishers that had sued it. But was it, really? In the days since the ruling was issued, several university-based copyright experts have argued that the reversal is not as bad as it might seem. (Read more from Wired Campus.)

The Best Teaching Resources on the Web

Those of us old enough to remember traveling to an out-of-the-way library to track down a potentially crucial roll of microfilm know just how much new technologies have transformed the way academics do research. We now happily rely on Google Books, JSTOR, and a whole parade of resources and databases available at the click of a finger. But what may be less obvious is the way new technologies have made improving our teaching a whole lot easier as well. (Read more from Vitae.)

Participatory Learning in the Art-History Classroom

In a participatory learning environment, learners get the opportunity to become part of a community of inquiry and explore abstract concepts in a nonhierarchical social context. Rather than the mere transmission and acquisition of knowledge, learning becomes relevant, engaging, and creative. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)

Tenure Track Wisdom Part Two

In the second of this series of faculty interviews, we hear from Laura Krystal Porterfield, who just finished her first year as an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. She received her PhD in urban education in 2013 from Temple University, where she a held fellowship at the Center for the Humanities. (Read more from Vitae.)

Finding a Job While ABD

Going on the job market without a degree in hand, emphasizing that holding off on job-searching until the dissertation, is a luxury that is not available to everyone. Yet the prospect of landing a job can be an invaluable motivator for an ABD candidate struggling with dissertation procrastination. Here are some tips for ABDs on how to juggle the demands of grad-student life and job searching while maximizing your chances at job-market success. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Museum Interface

It’s no longer a question of whether art institutions should have a virtual presence. Rather, the onus is being placed on designers to facilitate meaningful interactions with art that might occur in the gallery, via web-based applications or in new hybrid spaces that merge the real and the virtual. Any attempt to augment an encounter with artwork using technological means invariably raises questions about the values we assign to certain modes of viewing. After all, isn’t visiting a museum inherently tied to a very deep, very primary real-life experience? (Read more from Art in America.)

CAA has just published the Annual Report 2013–2014, which describes the organization’s accomplishments over the past year. You may download a PDF of the fully illustrated, twenty-three-page document.

Abundantly illustrated by photographs from the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago, the report presents a summary of an enormously productive year that included several major projects: a copublishing agreement with Taylor & Francis that brought all of CAA’s scholarly journals online; the ongoing fair-use initiative that will soon establish practical guidelines for the visual arts; and the restructuring of the individual membership program to better accommodate part-time faculty and independent art historians and artists.

Also covered is an overview of the CAA-Getty International Program, which brought twenty scholars from around the world to the Chicago conference, as well as a selected list of grants received during the fiscal year and statistics related to CAA News, www.collegeart.org, and social media. An update on professional-development activities and a financial statement on the 2014 fiscal year close the report.

We hope you will enjoy reading about CAA’s accomplishments.