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.

Conventional Wisdom

Thousands of literature scholars will emerge from their research cocoons, don their finest black duds, and descend upon Chicago for this year’s convention of the Modern Language Association. They’ll all be there: muckety-mucks whose rings ache for kissing; frazzled early-career professors angling for tenure; and, of course, hordes of desperate graduate students and barely employed PhDs, hoping to break into what everyone actually calls “the profession.” (Read more from Slate.)

How the Humanities Compute in the Classroom

Computer-assisted scholarship in the humanities dates back decades. In the past five years, though, the kinds of work collectively known as the digital humanities have taken on fresh luster. Observers have called this technology-inflected research “the next big thing.” Beyond the headlines and hoopla, digital scholarship has begun to work its way into the academic ecosystem. In the following collection of articles, read more about how the digital humanities play now in the undergraduate classroom, whether they pay off in tenure and promotion, and what it takes to create a work of digital scholarship that will last. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Garage Sale Renoir Painting Sparks Legal Battle with Museum

A one-of-a-kind Renoir painting the size of a napkin is at the center of an intense legal battle between a museum that claims it was stolen and a Virginia woman who claims she bought it for $7. The tiny work of art is an 1879 landscape by the Impressionist painter titled Paysage Bords de Seine. In court papers filed this week, the Baltimore Museum of Art claims the painting was stolen in 1951. As evidence, the museum provided a sixty-year-old police report, old museum catalogues, and a receipt showing that a patron bequeathed the painting to the museum. (Read more from ABC News.)

Conserving Priceless Chinese Paintings Is an Art All Its Own

Outside China and Taiwan, American museums hold the world’s best collection of Chinese paintings. It’s worth billions of dollars, but it’s also fragile: over time, these paintings fall apart. In the US, only four master conservators know how to take care of them, and they’re all approaching retirement. The Freer and Sackler Galleries—one of the huge, stone Smithsonian buildings on the National Mall in Washington, DC—employ one of those masters. (Read more from National Public Radio.)

Technology in Museums: Less Is More!

The experience of going to a museum often feels a little engineered. A heavy curatorial hand leads you through an exhibition, making it hard to resist reading the panels of information contextualizing and explaining the art or artifacts on display rather than come to your own appreciation of them. Audio guides offer to fill in gaps in your knowledge and give you expert insights. Sometimes glistening screens nearby beckon you to see more. (Read more from Spiked.)

Let’s Change the World for Art Students in 2014

Funding cuts and a move to banish art lessons from schools made 2013 a sad year for creative education. But art students and their staff are regrouping for a fight they believe is there to be won. The number of students applying to study creative arts in British universities is on the decline. According to the latest available data from UCAS, the number of applications fell 17 percent from 2011 to 2012. (Read more from the Guardian.)

Mock, Phone, Video Interviews

Participating in a mock interview my first time on the job market was the most embarrassing moment of my academic career. I dressed in as close to a suit as I owned at the time and walked into the large classroom we had scheduled, where the seven faculty members sat in a semicircle. They were all specialists in their fields, so their questions probed my ability to be conversant in each field, whereas my specialty was about combining the fields. Yet I wasn’t able to articulate how or why I did that. Realizing that I really couldn’t answer their questions was incredibly humbling. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Ten Tips for Tweeting at Conferences

Tweeting at conferences is a great way to share what you’re learning in a session with your followers and the wider world. It’s also a great way to be in two places at once, as you can read tweets from other sessions that you weren’t able to attend. You can read those tweets as they come in or—if you’d rather not fracture your attention—read them after the fact using a Twitter search. (Read more from ProfHacker.)

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 World’s Most Famous Missing Painting

Vincenzo Peruggia was not the kind of criminal mastermind that makes up the majority of art thieves in Hollywood films. He was not a genius cat burglar. He managed to walk into the Louvre in Paris and walk out with the Leonardo painting after minimal preparation. But his theft created a sensation. (Read more from BBC News.)

Understanding Wood Supports for Art: A Brief History

Historically, wood panels were used for paintings long before the adoption of flexible fabric supports. Most of the earliest icons still intact from the second and third century as well as a large portion of the Renaissance paintings were created on solid wood panels. Many of Raphael’s paintings, for example, are painted on primed wood panels. The method for preparing the panels was laborious as the solid wood was first dried well and sanded very smooth. It was then covered with layers of ground made by mixing gypsum (pounded into powder) with hide glue made from animal skins. The panel was then sanded and burnished until it was smooth and ready for painting. (Read more from Just Paint.)

Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications

This report brings up to date and expands upon the association’s 2004 report, Academic Freedom and Electronic Communications. It reaffirms that report’s overriding principle: “Academic freedom, free inquiry, and freedom of expression within the academic community may be limited to no greater extent in electronic format than they are in print, save for the most unusual situation where the very nature of the medium itself might warrant unusual restrictions.” (Read more from the American Association of University Professors.)

The British Library Puts One Million Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse and Remix

Earlier this week, Oxford’s Bodleian Library announced that it had digitized a 550-year old copy of the Gutenberg Bible along with a number of other ancient bibles, some of them quite beautiful. Not to be outdone, the British Library came out with its own announcement on Thursday: “We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain.” (Read more from Open Culture.)

Fakers, Fakes, and Fake Fakers

Many years ago, I interviewed a forger named David Stein. He had been arrested for faking hundreds of drawings, gouaches, and watercolors by Matisse, Chagall, Picasso, Cézanne, Degas, Miró, and many others. One day, while he was out on bail, I asked him how an art forger creates works by well-known artists whose styles are so different. “The first thing you have to do is know intimately the artist you are imitating, not only to know him but also to like him, to love his art,” Stein said. (Read more from ARTnews.)

Job Placement Confusion

With tuition prices continuing to rise and greater numbers of graduates struggling in the job market, families, students and policy makers—most visibly President Obama—are increasingly questioning the “value” that colleges are providing. In response to that mounting pressure, more colleges and universities are turning to alumni outcome surveys. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

How to Score That Elusive Spousal Hire

The spousal/couple/dual-career search is, hands down, the most stressful kind of academic job search there is. And I know this viscerally, because I had an ex-husband with a PhD—in a different humanities field, but still—and can still remember the sick feeling in my stomach, the cold sweats late at night, the gut-wrenching anxiety as I contemplated just how in god’s name we were going to get both of us gainfully employed on the tenure track. (Read more from Vitae.)

Need for Leaders at DC Arts Institutions Could Be a Golden Opportunity or a Squandered One

The Kennedy Center recently announced that Deborah Rutter of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association will become its new president, but many high-profile Washington cultural and arts institutions are still searching for new leaders to fill their top posts. The Smithsonian Institution announced in October that its secretary, Wayne Clough, would be stepping down next year, and Richard Koshalek, the former director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, resigned in May after the demise of his seasonal inflatable structure project. (Read more from the Washington Post.)

LACMA Resurrects Art and Technology Program, Teams with Google

More than forty-five years ago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art created an experimental program to bring artists and technology companies together in the hopes of inspiring innovative thinking in the visual arts. Earlier this month museum announced that it is resurrecting the program in the form of a laboratory and has partnered with companies including Google and SpaceX. (Read more from the Los Angeles Times.)