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.

The $1,000 Job Interview That Will Not Die

I’m relieved to see that more departments, in a diverse array of fields, are choosing to offer alternatives to the traditional convention interview—or to forego the first-round conference interview altogether, like they should, since, as many sane voices have already opined quite loudly, it is no longer necessary. However, it dismays me to report that some holdouts remain. (Read more from Vitae.)

Don’t Kill the Conference Interview

Rebecca Schuman recently called for the death of the conference interview for faculty jobs. A key reason she listed was the expense, citing the Modern Language Association’s recent convention as a case in point. In fact, she went to considerable length to prove that anyone traveling to Vancouver for that meeting would need to spend more than $1,000. But a data point is not a universal. Many faculty members with full-time jobs and many graduate students seeking employment still think the conference interview is a useful enterprise. (Read more from Vitae.)

How Not to Be a Jerk at Your Next Academic Conference

If you’ve spent any time at an academic conference, you know the scene: a stage full of scholars have just finished presenting their papers. As the Q&A session begins, a woman rises from the audience and prefaces her remarks by saying, in so many words, that she hadn’t been invited to appear on the panel. But here, anyway, are the highlights of her paper—and her credentials and biography, too. (Read more from Vitae.)

Teaching Artists Applying the Breadth of Their Skills

The typical structure of 99 percent of American nonprofit arts organizations includes segregated artistic, administrative, and development departments. My colleagues who work in such segregated institutions experience chasms between departments and waste time bickering and competing for an even share of resources. Aside from the intention of human-resource efficiency, I have never understood the acceptance of this structure. (Read more from ARTSblog.)

L’Origine du Monde Sparks Facebook Legal Battle

Facebook has been taken to court by a French user whose account was closed after he posted an image of Gustave Courbet’s racy painting L’Origine du Monde (1866). According to Le Figaro, the world-famous oil on canvas was part of a promo for an art-history video about the artwork, broadcasted by the highbrow TV channel Arte. The plaintiff, a Parisian schoolteacher, seeks the reactivation of his Facebook account and €20,000 in damages. (Read more from Artnet News.)

The NEA and the Federal Reserve Bank Reports

First, the release of the NEA report, A Decade of Arts Engagement, on arts attendance and participation—widely reported almost everywhere. Not much new here. Confirmation that attendance in the core arts continues a two-decade decline, while distribution of arts via technology is on the increase. Arts participation is up overall if you count “selfless” and downloading your favorite pop song, or maybe dancing in front of your mirror. (Read more from Barry’s Blog.)

Might at the Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s big, new move into twentieth-century art—propelled by Leonard Lauder’s recent $1 billion gift of eighty-one Cubist masterpieces—is altering the balance of power among New York’s biggest museums, a change compounded by the Whitney’s relocation downtown and the Museum of Modern Art’s controversial expansion plans. Sorting through talk of a growing rivalry between the Met and MoMA for artworks, board members, and prestige, Bob Colacello uncovers the forces at work. (Read more from Vanity Fair.)

Effective Ways to Structure Discussion

The use of online discussion in both blended and fully online courses has made clear that those exchanges are more productive if they are structured, if there’s a protocol that guides the interaction. This kind of structure is more important in the online environment because those discussions are usually asynchronous and miss all the nonverbal cues that facilitate face-to-face exchanges. But I’m wondering if more structure might benefit our in-class discussions as well. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

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.

With New Congress, Resale Royalties Bill Is Dead (Again)

This week, the 114th Congress took its seats, meaning that any bill not passed by both the House of Representatives and the Senate and signed by the president is a dead letter. This is the fate of many bills—indeed most. Art Law Report has followed two proposed laws for four years now, each of which have been introduced in some form in successive Congresses, only to lapse when a new Congress stepped in. (Read more from Art Law Report.)

Can the First Amendment Survive the Internet?

The internet presents First Amendment quandaries that seem fundamentally different from those society faced previously. But are they really? Once only people wealthy enough to own a newspaper or a broadcast station could reach a large audience. Now anyone with access to a computer or even a cellphone—in other words, just about everyone—can reach a large number of people almost instantly. It used to be, too, that serious research often required a trip to a distant library or museum. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

US Artists That Use Drones Could Be Grounded

Artists in the United States could have less than a year left to freely use drones in their work. Although current flight restrictions apply only to commercial, not artistic, use of drones, the Federal Aviation Administration is working on new regulations that are due to be submitted to Congress by September. The clampdown comes in the face of the drone’s growing accessibility. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

See What the Artworks See

As museum goers, we’re used to looking at art, but a new project from the filmmaker and artist Masashi Kawamura inverses the traditional relationship of viewer to artwork. For his blog What They See, Kawamura has taken photographs from the perspectives of famous artworks, inviting us into their visual fields. Among the works represented so far are Degas’s The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, who apparently spends her days at the Metropolitan Museum gazing at the arch of a doorway, and Modigliani’s Reclining Nude, who gazes sideways at the paintings on the opposite wall. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Describing Art: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Effects of Speaking on Gaze Movements during the Beholding of Paintings

Ever since the Renaissance, speaking about paintings has been a fundamental approach for beholders—especially experts. It is unclear, however, whether and how speaking about art modifies the way we look at it; this was not yet empirically tested. The present study investigated in what way speaking modifies the patterns of fixations and gaze movements while looking at paintings. (Read more from PLOS One.)

How to Survive a PhD Viva: Seventeen Top Tips

Handing in your PhD thesis is a massive achievement—but it’s not the end of the journey for doctoral students. Once you’ve submitted, you’ll need to prepare for the next intellectually grueling hurdle: a viva. This oral examination formally ensures that there’s no plagiarism involved, and that the student understands and can explain their thesis. It involves lots of penetrating questions and conceptually complex debates—and is infamously terrifying. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Ask the Art Professor: How Can I Study to Become a Professional Artist on My Own?

I am 23 years old and a beginning visual artist. I really want to get to a professional level but have no idea how to teach myself to get to that level. I can’t afford to go to art school and don’t have much money for local classes and workshops. Is there any way I could do this on my own? (Read more from the Huffington Post.)

Writing with a Heavy Teaching Load

Rachel Toor’s essay “The Habits of Highly Productive Writers” contains practical information for academics seeking to boost their written output; it also approaches the topic in a way that, for me, makes the whole endeavor seem a bit less daunting. I can imagine many readers came away from her column thinking, “I can do this.” And yet, I can also imagine that many full-time faculty members at community colleges and other teaching-focused institutions found themselves also thinking, “That would be nice—if only I had the time to write.” (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

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.

Artists’ Low Income and Status Are International Issues

In the UK, as the Paying Artists campaign revealed in 2014, the majority of contemporary artists are barely surviving financially, with no or low pay the norm. In real terms, nearly three-quarters of artists are getting just 37 percent of the average UK salary from their practice. But while some argue that it’s the absence of collective bargaining mechanisms that result in such exploitation, even in countries where there are well-developed fees systems, low pay for artists remains the burning issue. (Read more from the Guardian.)

New Focus: The Art of Making a Living

When administrators at University of the Arts were seeking a new way to prepare students for work after graduation, they didn’t have to look far. An answer lay just across Pine Street. They struck a cross-registration deal with Peirce College, a neighboring school that offers classes in finance, ecommerce, marketing, and app development. Kirk Pillow, the university’s provost, said it’s part of a broader effort to create value for students. (Read more from the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

What Can Learned Societies Do about Adjuncts?

What power do learned societies have to effect change? What is actually within their reach? These are not omnipotent organizations, despite the attempts to suggest they are. Their resources are finite as are their spheres of influence. What they should do doesn’t neatly fit with what they can do. This is not to defend the inaction of learned societies on the issue of contingent labor, but rather to contextualize the possibility of action and recourse. (Read more from Vitae.)

Help Desk: Breaking into Arts Journalism

I love writing and I love art. I have been teaching for ten years and am now looking to break into journalism and the arts. Should I head back to university and do a journalism course or attempt every competition possible in order to build a portfolio? (Read more from Daily Serving.)

Thirty Art-Writing Clichés to Ditch in the New Year

It’s a new year, which is a fine excuse as any to ditch old bad habits. Here below, I have assembled a not-at-all exhaustive list of art-writing words that I could do without in 2015. I admit, I’ve been guilty myself of abusing some or all of them—but of course that’s what New Year’s resolutions are for. (Read more from Artnet News.)

The Problem of the Overlooked Female Artist: An Argument for Enlivening a Stale Model of Discussion

Recently I was told that a certain art magazine editor, who had deleted the feminist critique from a review I had written, “can only take so much feminism.” At the time, I was infuriated that someone who is tasked with shaping the way art is discussed would take such an explicit and condescending stance against gender equality. With art-world professionals like him hoping that feminism would just go away, it feels necessary to be supportive of any museum exhibitions, gallery shows, market successes, or media attention given to women artists. (Read more from Hyperallergic.)

Measuring Diversity in City Arts Organizations

A mecca for the arts, New York City has also become one of the most multicultural cities in the country, with no single dominant racial or ethnic group and residents who speak more than two hundred languages, according to the Department of City Planning. Whether its cultural institutions reflect those demographics is another issue. (Read more from the Wall Street Journal.)

Raising the Profile of Columbia’s Art

Columbia University owns thousands of antiquities, antiques, and paintings, but it has no major display spaces and no comprehensive database. So the works largely go unnoticed even by some staff members. Roberto C. Ferrari, an art historian and librarian who became Columbia’s curator of art properties in 2013, has set out to raise the profile of the ten thousand objects on campus. (Read more from the New York Times.)

Will There Be Life after Death for New Private Museums?

From the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in October to the construction of the Broad in Los Angeles, now set to open this autumn, the model of the single-donor museum is thriving. You’d have to dial back the clock more than a century to the American “robber barons” like Frick, Morgan, and Huntington to find another moment in art history when so many great institutions were founded by powerful individuals instead of broader coalitions or private-public alliances. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)