CAA News Today
Soliciting Sign-On for DMCA § 1201 Rulemaking
posted Nov 25, 2014
CAA has signed on to this Petition to the US Copyright Office for Proposed Exemption Under 17 U.S.C. 1201 to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for the use of audiovisual media by college and university students or faculty in an educational setting. The DMCA prevents users from unlocking digital media or software. Congress has allowed review of the DMCA every three years to determine whether the law is affecting legitimate use of audiovisual material. In compliance to this three-year review the US Copyright Office has requested that examples be gathered of evidence where students or faculty were stopped from including a video clip in their teaching materials because of no access to decryption codes.
Student lawyers at American University are working on gathering examples and would appreciate hearing from those CAA members who have attempted to use audiovisual material from DVDs or off the web and were prevented from doing so. Please refer to the Google Form created to gather evidence and provide an easy forum for individuals to share their stories. This information will then be sent to the US Copyright Office to demonstrate the need for an exemption for students and faculty use of locked audiovisual materials. Deadline: December 30, 2014.
We would also like to share a piece for Forbes, written by Peter Decherney, which is an interesting read about some of the technology policy issues raised by the DMCA rulemaking.
Thank you for participating in this important petition.
Support CAA with a Gift to the Annual Fund
posted Nov 21, 2014
Since 1911, the College Art Association has served the individuals and institutions that make up the world’s largest professional association in the visual arts. Through its journals, standards and guidelines, resources on employment, advocacy, and its forum for exchange of creative and scholarly research at the Annual Conference, CAA supports and enhances the community in the visual arts. Today, I ask that you support all that CAA does with a gift to the Annual Fund.
As an enormously productive year comes to a close, we reflect on some highlights:
- CAA signed a copublishing agreement with Taylor & Francis that brought The Art Bulletin and Art Journal online for the first time
- CAA published Copyright, Permissions and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities: An Issues Report
- CAA hosted twenty scholars from around the world at the 102nd Annual Conference in Chicago through a Getty-sponsored travel grant program, increasing the organization’s presence globally
- Seven professional-development fellowships were awarded in 2014—two in art history and five in studio art—with awardees each receiving unrestricted grants of $5,000 to help further their careers
- CAA launched an enhanced membership program with new benefits and discounted membership offerings for part-time faculty and independent art historians and artists
Your contribution to the Annual Fund will enable CAA to continue this momentum well into 2015. Voluntary support from CAA members is critical to our collective advancement, and your contribution to the Annual Fund makes this important work possible.
On behalf of the artists, art historians, curators, critics, collectors, educators, and other professionals who make up CAA, I thank you for your dedication. Please give generously!
Sincerely,
Maria Ann Conelli
Vice President for External Affairs
2015–2016 Nominating Committee Seeks Members
posted Nov 20, 2014
CAA invites you to help shape the future of the organization by serving on the 2015–2016 Nominating Committee. Each year, this committee nominates and interviews potential candidates for the CAA Board of Directors and selects the final slate for the membership’s vote. The candidates for the 2015–19 board election were announced on November 10, 2014.
The Board of Directors and the Nominating Committee strive to find the best candidates that represent the broad subdisciplines and practitioners represented in the membership. The current Nominating Committee will choose the new members of its own committee at its business meeting, to be held at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York in February. Once selected, all committee members must propose, in the spring, a minimum of five and a maximum of ten people for the board. Service on the committee also involves conducting telephone interviews with candidates during the summer and meeting in fall 2015 in New York to select the final board slate. Finally, all Nominating Committee members attend their next business meeting, at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC, to select the succeeding committee.
Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement of interest and a 3–4 page condensed CV. Please email a statement and your CV as Word attachments, with the subject line “2015–2016 Nominating Committee,” to the attention of Charles A. Wright, CAA vice president for committees, care of Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison. Deadline: December 19, 2014.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Nov 19, 2014
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.
DIY Careers: How to Get Paid for Your Art
Often the biggest unknown in launching a DIY career is accounting. Most of us who go down this road are artists of one kind or another, so we don’t necessarily bring a lot of business acumen to the venture. We know how to create but not how to monetize our creation. Of course, not everyone is interested in assigning a value to their art, but anyone who is needs to incorporate some basic business knowledge into their creative endeavor. (Read more from Vitae.)
How Do Award-Winning Artists Spend Their Prize Money
The modern artist faces a conundrum: good work needs time and space, imaginative and physical. But making work also costs money; studios and materials don’t come cheap, and even aesthetes have to eat. So you get a job that pays … then you don’t have the time—or headspace—to make the work. We hear about the super-successful celebrity artists who make a fortune, but they are the minority. For emerging artists, making work and making ends meet is rarely easy. (Read more from the Independent.)
Full Ninth Circuit to Review California Resale Royalty Act En Banc
Several weeks ago, the parties to the appeal over the constitutionality of the California Resale Royalty Act briefed the question about whether the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals should hear the case, rather than a three-judge panel that would otherwise be assigned to the case. The Ninth Circuit granted the petition in late October, meaning the appeal will now go before the full court. The issue in the case is a California law that requires royalties on secondary sales of art, something that is not part of US copyright law and is more common in civil law countries as “droit de suite.” (Read more from the Art Law Report.)
If Artists Need to Know about VARA, So Do Judges
On August 11, 2010, Gasser Grunert Gallery in Manhattan sold Jomar Statkun’s painting Tubal Cain at Beggar’s Creek (2009) to an art collector for $16,000. Less a 50 percent commission, Statkun walked away with an $8,000 sale. At a party two years later, Statkun met a former employee of the gallery who told him that the gallery facilitated that sale by cropping ten inches off the painting to suit the space needs of the collector. (Read more from re:sculpt.)
How We Look When We Look at a Painting
Among the abounding fascinations of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a three-hour documentary about the museum on London’s Trafalgar Square, is a leitmotif of lingering shots of solitary viewers of paintings. Looking at art may be the most unguarded action that we perform in public. We aren’t aware of performing, of course, nor do we openly watch one another doing so. Wiseman’s studies of people entranced, or stupefied, by Leonardos and Vermeers amount to a pictorial essay on self-forgetting: faces young and old, plain and fancy, each as vulnerable as that of a sleepwalker. (Read more from the New Yorker.)
At Harvard, Three Become One
Three institutions will be united under one roof when the Harvard Art Museums reopen after a six-year building project. The Renzo Piano–designed scheme on the edge of the Harvard campus doubles the museums’ combined square footage, increasing gallery space by 40 percent. But the changes at Harvard extend well beyond bricks and mortar and creating extra space to show more of its 250,000-strong art collection. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)
On Elite Campuses, an Arts Race
Closed for six years, the Harvard Art Museums reopen after a radical overhaul by the architect Renzo Piano. He saved only the shell of the chaste, red-bricked Fogg Museum and its interior courtyard, extending it upward in sheets of glass and elegant truss work. Galleries wrap the new public space, but so do a materials lab, an art-conservation suite, and a study center, where students, faculty, and visitors can learn from the collection of 250,000 objects. (Read more from the New York Times.)
What the Midterm Elections Mean for the Arts: Summary of 2014 Election
In this year’s midterm elections, Republicans took back the Senate, kept control of the House, and won governorships in thirty-one states and counting. What does that mean for you and for us, as strong advocates of the arts and arts education? Here we break down the national, state, and local results—and their potential impact on the arts. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)
Call for Mock Interviewers
posted Nov 18, 2014
For the 2015 Annual Conference in New York, the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee seeks established professionals to volunteer as practice interviewers for the Mock Interview Sessions. Participating as an interviewer is an excellent way to serve the field and to assist with the professional development of the next generation of artists and scholars.
In these sessions, interviewers pose as a prospective employer, speaking with individuals in a scenario similar to the Interview Hall at the conference. Each session is composed of approximately 10–15 minutes of interview questions and a quick review of the application packet, followed by 5–10 minutes of candid feedback. Whenever possible, the committee matches interviewers and interviewees based on medium or discipline.
Interested candidates must be current CAA members and prepared to give six successive twenty-minute interviews with feedback in a two-hour period on one or both of these days: Thursday, February 12, 11:00 AM–1:00 PM and 3:00–5:00 PM; and Friday, February 13, 9:00–11:00 AM and 1:00–3:00 PM. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not required to be a mock interviewer. Desired for the sessions are art historians, art educators, designers, museum-studies professionals, critics, curators, and studio artists with tenure and/or experience on a search committee. You may volunteer for one, two, three, or all four Mock Interview Sessions.
Please send your name, affiliation, position, contact information, and the days and times that you are available to Megan Koza Young, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee. Deadline: January 31, 2015.
The Mock Interview Sessions are not intended as a screening process by institutions seeking new hires.
Practice Your Interviewing Technique at the New York Conference
posted Nov 17, 2014
Students and emerging professionals have the opportunity to sign up for a twenty-minute practice interview at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York. Organized by the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, Mock Interview Sessions give participants the chance to practice their interview skills one on one with a seasoned professional, improve their effectiveness during interviews, and hone their elevator speech. Interviewers also provide candid feedback on application packets.
Mock Interview Sessions are offered free of charge; you must be a CAA member to participate. Sessions are filled by appointment only and scheduled for Thursday, February 12, 11:00 AM–1:00 PM and 3:00–5:00 PM; and Friday, February 13, 9:00–11:00 AM and 1:00–3:00 PM. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate.
To apply, download, complete, and send the 2015 Mock Interview Sessions Enrollment Form to Megan Koza Young, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, by email to sepccaa@gmail.com or by mail to: 706 Webster Street, New Orleans, LA 70118. You may enroll in one twenty-minute session. Deadline: February 5, 2015.
You will be notified of your appointment day and time by email. Please bring your application packet, including cover letter, CV, and other materials related to jobs in your field. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will make every effort to accommodate all applicants; however, space is limited.
Onsite enrollment will be limited and first-come, first-served. Sign up in the Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge starting on Wednesday, February 11, at 4:00 PM.
Notice of 103rd Annual Business Meeting
posted Nov 14, 2014
Notice of 103rd Annual Business Meeting
College Art Association, February 13, 2015
The 103rd Annual Meeting of the members of the College Art Association will be held on Friday, February 13, 2015 from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. (EST) in the Rendezvous Trianon Ballroom, 3rd Floor, Hilton New York Hotel, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, NY NY 10010. CAA’s President, DeWitt Godfrey, will preside.
AGENDA
- Call to Order: DeWitt Godfrey, President
- Approval of Minutes of Annual Business Meeting, February 14, 2014 [ACTION ITEM] – See Minutes at http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2014_annual_business_meeting_minutes.pdf
- President’s Report: DeWitt Godfrey
- Financial Report: Teresa Lopez, Chief Financial Officer
- Old Business
- New Business
- Results of Election of New Directors: DeWitt Godfrey
Proxies
If you are unable to attend the Annual Meeting, please complete a proxy online to appoint the individuals named thereon to (i) vote, in their discretion, on such matters as may properly come before the Annual Meeting; and (ii) to vote in any and all adjournments thereof. CAA Members will be notified when the online proxy, and the ability to cast votes for directors, will be available, which will be in early January 2015. A proxy and vote must be received no later than 5:00 p.m. (EST) on Friday, February 13, 2015.
Next Meeting
The 104th Annual Meeting of the College Art Association will take place on Friday, February 5, 2016 in Washington, D. C.
Doralynn Pines, Secretary
College Art Association
November 12, 2014
Teaching Evaluation Survey
posted Nov 13, 2014
The following message came from Craig Vasey, chair of the Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publications for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
Teaching Evaluation Survey
The Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publications is interested in determining to what degree there is consistency nationally in attitudes toward faculty teaching evaluations, in methods used for it, and in institutional practices surrounding it. We have developed a survey, and urge you to provide us information about your institution and your experience.
The survey can be taken at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/teaching-evaluation.
Without your input, we cannot effectively bring these issues into the national conversation on the quality and the future of higher education. This is not intended to be a survey only of AAUP members, but of as many faculty in higher education in the USA as we can reach. Please share this with colleagues and encourage them to participate.
CAA Update from the President
posted Nov 13, 2014
DeWitt Godfrey, professor of art and art history at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York, is president of the CAA Board of Directors.
CAA is moving ahead on several strategic goals. After a year of investigation and discussion with over 200 artists, art historians, curators, editors and reproduction rights officers, Professors Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi are drafting the new Code of Best Practices in Fair Use in the Visual Arts which will be reviewed by the Task Force on Fair Use, the Committee on Intellectual Property, the Professional Practices Committee, and an independent Legal Advisory Committee. We anticipate that the code will be presented at the Annual Conference in February 2015.
At the October 26th Board meeting, the formation of two task forces was approved: one to review CAA’s governance structure, and one to review its professional committees. As a greater number of faculty are now part-time, the board and committee requirements have to be adjusted so that the best expertise is brought to CAA within the most economical timeframes. The Board also had a lively discussion on the best directions to be taken regarding advocacy and how CAA can respond quickly and efficiently to issues that affect members’ daily work. We are exploring the creation of a task force on advocacy.
The CAA Board and senior staff held a day-long retreat which focused on a vision for the future of the annual conference—a more flexible structure, greater opportunities for interdisciplinary discussion, serving the needs and interests at each stage of a career in the visual arts, and the ability to quickly address issues that arise in the field, have an international perspective and participation, and reach those members who are not able to attend the conferences.
New, updated volumes of the Directories of Graduate Programs are now available through CAA’s website. From the data published in the directories, CAA will draw statistical information about all the visual-arts subdisciplines, mapping important changes in the field regarding enrollment and employment. We plan to make information from the past four years available to members in the coming months.
The September issue of The Art Bulletin features the third essay in the “Whither Art History?” series, as well as essays on Jan van Eyck and commemorative art, Hans Burgkmair and recognition, Watteau and reverie, and contemporary Indian Art from the 1985-86 Festival of India. The latest issue of Art Journal includes a forum called “Red Conceptualismos del Sur/Southern Conceptualisms Network,” featuring articles printed in their original Spanish and Portuguese alongside new English translations—this is the first foray into multilingual publishing for CAA. Art Journal Open’s first web editor, Gloria Sutton, associate professor at Northeastern University, has commissioned features from the artist Karen Schiff and the new-media historian Mike Maizels, as well as a dialogue between the curator Becky Huff Hunter and the artist Tamarin Norwood. The vision for this website is to provide an online space for artists’ works, experimental scholarship, and conversations among arts practitioners. And caa.reviews, now open access, includes nearly 2,500 reviews of books, exhibition catalogues, and conferences on art, as well as an annual list of completed and in-progress art history dissertations. Thirty-four field editors commission reviewers to address new publications, exhibitions, and exhibition catalogues and videos in every area of the visual arts. The new copublishing relationship between CAA and Taylor & Francis that supports all three CAA journals will complete its first year this month with a marked increase in readership. We are encouraging authors to use the multimedia resources offered at Taylor & Francis Online as well as its citation app.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded CAA and the Society for Architectural Historians a grant to cooperatively carry out research and develop guidelines in digital art and architectural history for promotion and tenure in the workforce. With the increased use of digital platforms in research and publishing there is a need for guidelines that reflect the best practice in evaluating digital art and architectural history. A task force will be formed of two art historians, two architectural historians, a librarian, a museum curator, a scholar from another humanities or social science field with expertise in digital scholarship, and a graduate student or emerging professional in art history or architectural history. CAA will hire a part-time researcher to gather information on current practices from faculty members throughout the country. Please see the Online Career Center for the listing.
CAA, like other learned, membership societies, faces significant challenges and opportunities for the future. The changing landscape of publication, academic workforce issues, advocating for the arts and humanities, serving a changing membership and the field are areas where CAA has and will continue to make a difference, by building on our legacy of leadership and embracing the necessary changes required to meet our mission and vision.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Nov 12, 2014
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.
Judge OKs Bankruptcy Plan: A “Miraculous” Outcome
A federal judge approved a plan to end Detroit’s historic Chapter 9 bankruptcy, giving the Motor City an unprecedented shot at recovering from decades of economic despair and municipal mismanagement that left the city awash in debt and struggling to provide basic public services. Judge Steven Rhodes ruled that Detroit’s comprehensive restructuring plan is fair and feasible, providing the legal authority for the city to slash more than $7 billion in unsecured liabilities and reinvest $1.4 billion over ten years in public services and blight removal. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)
“Grand Bargain” Saves the Detroit Institute of Arts
With his decision approving this city’s federal bankruptcy plan, Judge Steven W. Rhodes—aided by nearly a billion dollars in private and state rescue money—ended an unprecedented threat to the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose world-class paintings and sculpture could have been parceled off at auction to help pay city debt. (Read more from the New York Times.)
Warburg Institute Safe as High Court Rules Contents Not the Property of University of London
To the benefit and relief of scholars worldwide, the High Court has rejected the University of London’s claims that all additions to the Warburg Institute since 1944 belong to the university, and instead agreed that they form part of the institute. Furthermore, Justice Proudman held that the University is obliged to provide funding for the activities of the Warburg Institute. (Read more from the Warburg Institute.)
Help Desk: Crowd Funding
I have many friends who are running crowd-funding campaigns. Part of me wants to contribute because these people are my friends, but I would never think to ask others to fund my art practice. Should I give to these campaigns or pretend I never saw the emails? Should I run one myself the next time I need to travel or buy a new laptop? (Read more from Daily Serving.)
Emerging Artists and the New Spirit of Capitalism
Pointing to the avarice of the art world, to its entanglement with big money, is an old game. Concerns about the “corrupting influence” of the market are likely as old as the market itself, and are still voiced with some frequency. Most recently David Bryne caused a surprising ripple of ire by describing how the big money of the Chelsea art scene was making it difficult for him to give the work itself a fair viewing. However, the issue of contemporary art’s relationship to capitalism is more complicated and thorny than being merely a matter of the staggering prices demanded at elite galleries. (Read more from Public Seminar.)
What Can You Really Do with a Degree in the Arts?
Is my BA in creative writing of any use to me at all? It’s hard to say. I sort of have a career in the arts in that I write and think about art all the time. But the relationship between my arts career and my actual career is tenuous. I earn my living writing, but it’s not exactly the type of writing they were preparing me for back at Oberlin. Rather than poetry or fiction or even creative nonfiction, I write entries for business encyclopedias, create items for high school and elementary standardized tests, and do the occasional online study guide for Stephen King novels. (Read more from the Atlantic.)
NCIS: Provence: The Van Gogh Mystery
For many decades, suicide was the unquestioned final chapter of Vincent van Gogh’s legend. But in their 2011 book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith offered a far more plausible scenario—that van Gogh was killed—only to find themselves under attack. Now, with the help of a leading forensic expert, the authors take their case a step further. (Read more from Vanity Fair.)
Culture War: The Case against Repatriating Museum Artifacts
Repatriation claims on the national identity of antiquities are at the root of many states’ cultural property laws, which in the last few decades have been used by governments to reclaim objects from museums and other collections abroad. Despite UNESCO’s declaration that “no culture is a hermetically sealed entity,” governments are increasingly making claims of ownership of cultural property on the basis of self-proclaimed and fixed state-based identities. (Read more from Foreign Affairs.)