CAA News Today
CAA and the Monuments Men
posted Feb 06, 2014
The American Council of Learned Societies held a premiere showing of George Clooney’s Monuments Men, the Hollywood film based on Robert Edsel’s The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History. The film demonstrates the contributions of art historians who investigated the thousands of art works and archival manuscripts looted by the Nazis and secretly stored in mines around Germany during the WWII. Members of ACLS initiated the interest in saving European monuments during WWII and many CAA members participated.
Former CAA President (1952-1955), Professor Lane Faison who chaired the Art History Department at Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts from 1940-1969 that, during his time, graduated so many students who became museum directors (Thomas Kerns, Glenn Lowry, Roger Mandle, Earl Powell) served in the Office of Strategic Services (later to become the CIA) in 1945 assigned to a group called the Art Looting Investigation Unit to find out what the Nazi’s had done with the art that they had stolen. He was one of three art historian officers including James S. Plaut and Theodore Rousseau who collected evidence for the Nuremburg Trials. The Monuments Men relied on these extensive lists to track down the stolen work.
Jack Hyland, CAA’s Treasurer, investment banker, media advisor and author (see www.jackwhyland.com) of a thriller The Moses Virus: A Novel and Evangelism’s First Modern Media Star: Reverend Bill Stidger (a biography of his grandfather who was the model for Elmer Gantry) interviewed Lane Faison on his 90th birthday for the July 1998 CAA News article: “People of the Eye” [http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/LaneFaisonInterview.pdf]. The article covers, in part, CAA President Faison’s recollections of being a Monuments Man.
What a thrill it was to see at last a Hollywood film where art historians are portrayed as heroes on the silver screen –granted a bit past their prime but able to screw up their courage to capture a sniper, lose their lives in defense of Michaelangelo’s Bruge Madonna, and retrieve the entire Ghent Alterpiece just ahead of the looting Russians. The film is complete with patriotic music and outstanding images of the original works of art instead of the typical reproductions. The major facts are adhered to and the reality is driven home that many people died in the effort to retrieve the art important to world heritage with little support from the military, Congress and the White House.
News from the Art and Academic Worlds
posted Feb 05, 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.
No Laughing Matter: President’s Quip about Art History Pricks Some Ears
Art history caught some unwelcome attention from President Obama in a recent speech emphasizing the need for job training. To reinforce his point that manufacturing jobs pay off, Obama said that young people who train for them could outearn art-history majors. The remark drew laughter from the president’s audience in Wisconsin, but some in higher education felt slighted. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Experts Say Academics Are Timid about Fair-Use Laws
Professionals in the visual arts—including art historians—let real and perceived fears about copyright law get in the way of their work, finds a new report from CAA. And while the fundamentally visual nature of their discipline raises particular concerns among scholars of art, artists, editors, and museum curators, experts say their fears are shared across academe—although some disciplines have worked to develop codes to help scholars navigate the murky waters of fair use. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Teaching for the First Time? Read “Purposeful Pedagogy”
Most doctoral students enter the classroom without any formal teaching experience or pedagogical training. Instead, they are often provided, at best, a quick orientation that offers tricks before entering the undergrad classroom as teachers. As a result, graduate students begin teaching without any support or training to help them be successful. (Read more from Art History Teaching Resources.)
A Modigliani? Who Says So?
Three daunting facts confront anyone interested in buying one of Amedeo Modigliani’s distinctive elongated portraits. They tend to have multimillion price tags; they are a favorite of forgers; and despite an abundance of experts, no inventory of his works is considered both trustworthy and complete. (Read more from New York Times.)
DIA’s $100 Million Pledge to Rescue Fund Helps Clear Path to Bankruptcy Resolution
In a whirlwind day that marks a turning point in Detroit’s historic bankruptcy, the Detroit Institute of Arts pledged $100 million to a growing rescue fund to protect pensions and art, and emergency manager Kevyn Orr released to major creditors an early version of the massive restructuring proposal for the city’s estimated $18.5 billion in debt and liabilities. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)
Now Starts the Hard Work for DIA: Raise $100 Million to Meet Its Pledge
The Detroit Institute of Arts has pledged $100 million to the growing rescue fund to shore up municipal pensions, shield its treasures from sale, and spin the city-owned museum into an independent nonprofit. But now DIA leaders have to go out and make good on their word and raise the money. (Read more from the Detroit Free Press.)
Adjuncts Gain Traction with Congressional Attention
Maria C. Maisto went to Capitol Hill last fall to correct what she saw as a misperception about colleges’ response to the nation’s new healthcare law. By the time she left, she had accomplished something bigger. She had gotten lawmakers talking about higher education’s reliance on adjuncts and how their working conditions make it difficult for them to do their best work. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
New Report Urges More Emphasis in Adjunct Faculty Conditions during Accreditation
Accreditors “can and should be doing more” on site visits and in their standards to address concerns about adjunct faculty employment and its effect on student learning, says a report from the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. “Campuses often do not evaluate the type of support they have in place to help faculty perform to their highest capabilities,” the report says. “The negative student learning outcomes [associated with overreliance on adjunct faculty] that have been documented have occurred in part because institutions have not updated or changed.” (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)
Abstracts and Directory of Attendees for the 2014 Annual Conference
posted Feb 05, 2014
Registrants for the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago can now download a PDF of Abstracts 2014, which summarizes the contents of hundreds of papers and talks that were presented in program sessions. They can also search the online 2014 Directory of Attendees, which contains the names and contact information of those who registered by the early and advance deadlines.
Reading the abstracts in advance can help you plan your daily schedule at the conference. Program sessions are alphabetized by the chair’s last name and appear in the contents pages (4–10). An index in the back of the publication names all the speakers. Alternatively, use your Adobe Reader to conduct a keyword search for terms relevant to your interests. Similarly, the Directory of Attendees helps with networking during and communication after the conference.
To access the two publications, registrants can log into their CAA account, click the “Conference Registrant Information” image, and then click the Abstracts and/or Directory of Attendees icon. The Abstracts and Directory of Attendees are part of the registration package; there is no added cost to paid or complimentary registrants for access to these publications.
Conference attendees who purchase single-time slot tickets, or those who want the Abstracts but are not coming to Chicago, may attain the document for a charge: $30 for CAA members and $35 for nonmembers. The Abstracts and Directory of Attendees will remain on the CAA website for download or sale through July 31, 2014.
Beginning with the 2010 conference in Chicago, CAA offers its Abstracts exclusively as a PDF download. Past issues of the printed publication from 1999 to 2009 are also available. The cost per copy is $30 for CAA members and $35 for nonmembers. For more information and to order, please contact Roberta Lawson, CAA office coordinator.
Report on “Fair Use: Art and Copyright online” at Eyebeam Artists in Conversation
posted Feb 05, 2014
On Saturday, January 25, 2014, New York’s Eyebeam Art + Technology Center held a panel discussion on fair use, art, and copyright online. The three speakers were Patricia Aufderheide, Codirector of the Center for Social Media at American University and one of the Principal Investigators for CAA’s Fair Use Initiative (http://www.cmsimpact.org/fair-use), Elisa Kreisinger, video artist and artist-in-residence at Eyebeam and Public Knowledge (http://elisakreisinger.wordpress.com/), and Michael Weinberg, Co-Vice President of Public Knowledge, a digital advocacy group in Washington DC (http://publicknowledge.org/).
Kreisinger began the discussion by presenting her work Mad Men: Set Me Free, a video based on dialogue among the female characters in the television series and remixed into an effective and witty feminist presentation. Kreisinger recounted the challenge she faced posting her video on YouTube, when the hosting site automatically took down the piece because of a scanning system that alerted Mad Men’s producer, Lionsgate Films, about the work. Lionsgate has an ongoing policy with YouTube that asks the company to remove anything from the site that uses their films and TV shows. Kreisinger is in the process of appealing this action. She organized Eyebeam’s panel in order to air her concerns and engage two advocates of the fair use principles that are part of the copyright law to open the discussion on what artists can do in similar situations. Kreisinger stated that when she was faced with YouTube takedowns, Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s book, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright, was very helpful in guiding her actions. Especially as an artist working on her own, the book helped her prepare a fair use defense of using sections of the television series for her work.
Kreisinger then asked Aufderheide and Weinberg to discuss the principle of fair use. They described the original intent of copyright law: to promote the dissemination of creative work while attributing credit and ownership to the originator. The complexity of copyright law can be daunting to individual creators of new work. Fair use was instituted to allow users of copyrighted works greater leeway of access and use in certain circumstances. Reclaiming Fair Use discusses what the courts focus on in disputes regarding copyright and fair use: transformativeness (did you re-use the material for a new purpose, and thus add value to the work?) and appropriateness (did you use the right amount of the work, which could be up to 100% if you have a go od reason?). These questions set the priorities, for today’s courts, for interpreting the traditional “four factors” that the law sets down to consider: the character of the new use, the nature of the original work, the amount, and effect on market value.
But many artists don’t know their rights. Aufderheide discussed the Issues Report recently-released by CAA (http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/FairUseIssuesReport.pdf), which summarized 100 recent interviews with art historians, artists, museum curators, editors and publishers regarding issues with third-party images in creative and scholarly work. As she and Peter Jaszi, professor of law at American University, wrote in the report, 34% of the visual arts professionals interviewed altered or abandoned a work because of copyright: 21% were artists, 38.3% were art historians and curators and 57% were editors and publishers. This indicates a critical loss of creative and scholarly work due to complications and costs of copyright and licensing images. There is no doubt that confusion about the lawful use of fair use has led to a reluctance to employ it; this in turn has had a chilling effect on the visual arts community.
Kreisinger had completed a survey of digital artists, especially remixers, and discovered that many said they did know they had fair use rights, but found them blocked by scanning systems used by hosting platforms such as YouTube that identify copyrighted work. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 protects Internet hosts from monetary liability if they take down work that copyright holders claim infringes on their rights in a work. The automated systems finding digital matches do not discriminate between fair use and infringement. Sometimes artists’ work, even when employed under fair use, was matched with advertising according to a previous contract between Google and copyright holders, and sometimes it was taken down. For many artists, it feels like a David and Goliath situation.
Both Aufderheide and Weinberg acknowledged the frustrating situation of the ad matches, and emphasized the importance of bringing counter-takedown notices when your work has been unfairly taken down. Most takedowns happen as a result of automatic searches of databases, which don’t distinguish fair uses from infringing uses. So counter-takedowns are crucial to keeping work circulating. Artists, they noted, get tired of contesting sometimes-bogus claims, but persistence is critical to preventing private censorship.
Aufderheide noted that it is hard to push back against a takedown notice unless you are sure you are within your fair use rights. In some fields, codes of best practices exist, identifying common practices that employ fair use, asserting the rationale for that employment and also showing fair use’s limits in those situations. The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video is one such code; another is the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. Both have been used by remixers making counter-takedown arguments.
The College Art Association has decided to create a code of best practices in fair use for the visual arts communities. Over the next six months Aufderheide and Jaszi will be conducting discussion groups to continue to develop a code of best practices in utilizing fair use for creative and scholarly work. These discussions will be held in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. with art historians, artists, museum curators, editors, publishers, visual resources officers and gallerists. They will provide a basis for the development of a code of best practices, which will be reviewed by CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property, its Task Force on Fair Use, and a Legal Advisory Committee. Once finalized, the code of best practices will be presented to the CAA Board of Directors for approval and widely disseminated.
CAA Offers Free Tickets to The Monuments Men
posted Feb 04, 2014
CAA is giving away free movie tickets to special screenings of The Monuments Men, directed by and starring George Clooney, in four cities across the United States to its members. The organization has ten tickets (five pairs) for the New York screening; ten tickets (five pairs) for Los Angeles; six tickets (three pairs) for Chicago; and six tickets (three pairs) for Houston.
Please send your name, the name of your guest, your city, and your CAA User/Member ID# to caanews@collegeart.org by 3:00 PM EST today. Winners will be notified after 4:00 PM.
The Monuments Men were a group of approximately 345 men and women from thirteen nations who comprised the MFAA section during World War II. Many were museum directors, curators, art historians, artists, architects, and educators—and also members of CAA. Together they worked to protect monuments and other cultural treasures from the destruction of World War II. In the last year of the war, they tracked, located, and in the years that followed returned more than five million artistic and cultural items stolen by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Their role in preserving cultural treasures was without precedent.
All four screenings will take place this Wednesday, February 5, 2014, at 7:30 PM. Here are the locations:
- New York screening: AMC Loews West 34th Street 14, 312 West 34th Street, Manhattan
- Los Angeles screening: Edwards Long Beach 26 and IMAX, 7501 Carson Boulevard, Long Beach
- Chicago screening: AMC Showplace Cicero 14, 4779 West Cermak Road
- Houston screening: AMC Gulf Pointe 30, 11801 South Sam Houston Parkway East
Tickets to The Monuments Men are guaranteed, not first-come, first-served. CAA will send the winners’ names to the film promoter, who will put them on the VIP list. You will not need printed tickets.
Watch the Trailer
Wix.com Webinar on Creating a Strong Online Presence
posted Feb 03, 2014
Creating a strong online presence is the key to a successful career. During this special workshop for CAA, to be held on Wednesday, February 5, 2014, 3:00–4:00 PM EST, representatives from Wix.com will go over the fundamentals for creating a personal online brand. They will also explain how to choose the best social channels, visual branding, and website creation with Wix.com, a no-code, visual drag-and-drop editor that uses the latest HTML5 technology to help you build the best website possible. With Wix you can have a beautiful, free website in just a few hours.
Obama and Art History
posted Jan 30, 2014
The College Art Association has great respect for President Obama’s initiative to provide all qualified students with an education that can lead to gainful employment. We support all measures that he, Congress, State Legislatures and colleges and universities can do to increase the opportunities for higher education. However, when these measures are made by cutting back on, denigrating or eliminating humanities disciplines such as art history, then America’s future generations will be discouraged from taking advantage of the values, critical and decisive thinking and creative problem solving offered by the humanities. It is worth remembering that many of the nation’s most important innovators, in fields including high technology, business, and even military service, have degrees in the humanities. Humanities graduates play leading roles in corporations, engineering, international relations, government, and many other fields where their skills and creating thinking play a critical role. Let’s not forget that education across a broad spectrum is essential to develop the skills and imagination that will enable future generations to create and take advantage of new jobs and employment opportunities of all sorts.
Read more coverage on this topic:
http://chronicle.com/article/No-Laughing-Matter-/144327/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
http://hyperallergic.com/109775/presidents-obama-pens-personal-apology-to-an-art-historian/
Obama and Art History
posted Jan 30, 2014
The College Art Association has great respect for President Obama’s initiative to provide all qualified students with an education that can lead to gainful employment. We support all measures that he, Congress, State Legislatures and colleges and universities can do to increase the opportunities for higher education. However, when these measures are made by cutting back on, denigrating or eliminating humanities disciplines such as art history, then America’s future generations will be discouraged from taking advantage of the values, critical and decisive thinking and creative problem solving offered by the humanities. It is worth remembering that many of the nation’s most important innovators, in fields including high technology, business, and even military service, have degrees in the humanities. Humanities graduates play leading roles in corporations, engineering, international relations, government, and many other fields where their skills and creating thinking play a critical role. Let’s not forget that education across a broad spectrum is essential to develop the skills and imagination that will enable future generations to create and take advantage of new jobs and employment opportunities of all sorts.
Read more coverage on this topic:
http://chronicle.com/article/No-Laughing-Matter-/144327/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
CAA Appoints New Committee Members
posted Jan 30, 2014
CAA’s nine Professional Interests, Practices, and Standards Committees welcome their newly appointed members, who will serve three-year terms (2014–17). In addition, three new chairs will take over committee leadership. New committee members and chairs will begin their terms at the 2014 Annual Conference in Chicago. CAA warmly thanks all outgoing committee members for their years of service to the organization.
A call for nominations for these committees appears annually from July to September in CAA News and on the CAA website. CAA’s president, vice president for committees, and executive director review all nominations in November and make appointments that take effect the following February. CAA’s vice president for committees is an ex officio member of all nine groups.
New Committee Members and Chairs
Committee on Diversity Practices: Amanda Cachia, University of California, San Diego; Lisandra Estevez, Winston-Salem State University; Christine Young-Kyung Hahn, Kalamazoo College; and Barbara Mendoza, Santa Clara University.
Committee on Intellectual Property: Susan Bielstein, University of Chicago Press; Nathan Budoff, University of Puerto Rico; and Mary DelMonico, DelMonico Books/Prestel. The new committee chair is Judy Metro of the National Gallery of Art.
Committee on Women in the Arts: Christine Filippone, Millersville University; and Cecilia Mandrile, University of the West of England.
Education Committee: Denise Amy Baxter, University of North Texas; Katherine Brown, Walsh University; Dana Byrd, Bowdoin College; and Andrew Hairstans, Auburn University.
International Committee: Jennifer Griffiths, American University of Rome; Abayomi Ola, Spelman College; Miriam Paeslack, University at Buffalo, State University of New York; Judy Peter, University of Johannesburg; and Sarah Smith, Glasgow School of Art. Rosemary O’Neill of Parsons the New School for Design is the new committee chair.
Museum Committee: Antoniette (Toni) Guglielmo, Getty Leadership Institute, Claremont Graduate University; Anne Manning, Baltimore Museum of Art; and Leslee Katrina Michelsen, Museum of Islamic Art.
Professional Practices Committee: Paul Catanese, Columbia College Chicago; Michael Grillo, University of Maine; Bruce Mackh, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Ellen Mueller, West Virginia Wesleyan College; Katherine Sullivan, Hope College; and Joe A. Thomas, Kennesaw State University. Anne McClanan of Portland State University is the new committee chair.
Services to Artists Committee: David J. Brown, Fine Art Museum, Western Carolina University; Zoe Charlton, American University; Darren Douglas Floyd, Davidson College; and Stacy Miller, Parsons the New School for Design.
Student and Emerging Professionals Committee: Brittany Lockard, Wichita State University; Tamryn McDermott, University of Missouri, Columbia; Carrie Pavel, Georgia Institute of Technology; and Lauren Puzier, Sotheby’s Institute of Art.
CAA Publishes Fair Use Issues Report
posted Jan 29, 2014
CAA is pleased to announce the publication of Copyright, Permissions and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities: An Issues Report. Endorsed by CAA’s Board of Directors on January 24, 2014, the report is now available on CAA’s website (here) and will also be distributed in printed form at the upcoming Annual Conference in Chicago. The report was written by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, professors of communications and law, respectively, at American University; and graduate fellows Bryan Bello and Tijana Milosevic. Aufderheide and Jaszi are the project’s lead researchers and two of its principal investigators. Their report summarizes 100 interviews of art historians, artists, museum curators, editors and publishers describing issues related to the use of third-party images in creative and scholarly work. The research was further informed by a CAA membership survey on fair use and a review of relevant literature and legal precedents.
This issues report reveals a situation in which uncertainty about copyright law and the availability of fair use, particularly in the digital era, has made many practitioners risk-averse, too often abandoning or distorting projects due to real or perceived challenges in using copyrighted materials. The report was read by the project’s Principal Investigators, Project Advisors, and members of the CAA Task Force on Fair Use, its Committee on Intellectual Property, and a Community Practices Advisory Committee. A full list of these individuals appears as an appendix in the report.
By identifying key concerns, the Issues Report makes an important contribution toward addressing questions related to the use of copyrighted materials and the understanding of fair use principles. It represents an important step in CAA’s work to develop and disseminate a Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in the Creation and Curation of Artworks and Scholarly Publishing in the Visual Arts. Over the coming year, CAA will host small group discussions in five cities (Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C.) among visual arts professionals, guided by Professors Aufderheide and Jaszi, to identify areas of consensus in how fair use can be employed. These deliberations will undergird the development of a code of best practices, which will be reviewed by the project’s Principal Investigators, Project Advisors, members of the CAA Task Force on Fair Use, its Committee on Intellectual Property, and a Legal Advisory Committee. Once finalized, it will be presented to the CAA Board of Directors for approval and widely disseminated.
During CAA’s 102nd Annual Conference in Chicago (February 12–15, 2014), Aufderheide and Jaszi will discuss this project publicly with Anne Collins Goodyear, CAA president; Jeffrey Cunard, co-chair of CAA’s Task Force on Fair Use; Christine Sundt, chair of CAA’s Committee on Intellectual Property (CIP), and Paul Catanese, associate chair and associate professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Arts at Columbia College and chair of CAA’s New Media Caucus. The session will take place on Saturday, February 15, from 12:30 to 2:00 p.m. at the Hilton Chicago.
CAA’s Fair Use Initiative is supported by a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It also received generous preliminary funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.