CAA News Today

The new art documentary film Herb & Dorothy 50×50, the sequel to the beloved Herb & Dorothy, opens on September 13, 2013, at IFC Center in New York. Join Fine Line Media on the opening weekend for special appearances and postscreening Q&As by the director Megumi Sasaki, the art collector Dorothy Vogel, and prominent contemporary artists in the Vogel Collection.

Herb and Dorothy Vogel were two ordinary New Yorkers—a postal worker and librarian, respectively—who built a world-class collection of modern and contemporary art with their modest salaries and then donated it, in its entirety, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. They never sold a piece for profit, and when the collection grew too large even for the National Gallery, the Vogels launched an unprecedented gift project that distributed fifty works of art to one museum in each of the fifty states in America—a total of 2,500 works.

Early-bird tickets for the screening of Herb & Dorothy 50×50 at IFC Theater can be purchased in advance. Use Facebook and Twitter to keep up with the film’s activities.

Following the New York premiere, the film will screen in forty theaters and museums across the United States; please see the full theater list for a location close to you. Fine Line Media would love to reach out to colleges and universities near these venues to see if there might be the possibility of joining forces to promote the film. Fine Line Media would also deeply appreciate the chance to connect with schools that do not have a screening planned near them to discuss the possibility of showing Herb & Dorothy 50×50 at their institution.

Watch the Trailer

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.

Higher-Ed Associations Form Joint Steering Group to Build Federated System for Publicly Funded Research

The Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities have announced the formation of a joint steering group to advance a proposed network of digital repositories at universities, libraries, and other research institutions across the United States that will provide long-term public access to federally funded research articles and data. (Read more from the Association of Research Libraries.)

Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology

Online education arguably came of age in the last year, with the explosion of massive open online courses driving the public’s (and politicians’) interest in digitally delivered courses and contributing to the perception that they represent not only higher education’s future, but its present. Faculty members, by and large, still aren’t buying—and they are particularly skeptical about the value of MOOCs, Inside Higher Ed’s new Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology suggests. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

The Berlin Decision: Old Masters Stay Put

Jeffrey Hamburger, the Harvard professor behind the petition, now more than a year old, asking Prussian authorities to reconsider their plan to mothball half of Berlin’s collection of old masters so they could place a modern art collection in the Gemäldegalerie, its current home, is declaring victory. And, true, the old-master paintings will not move from their current location. (Read more in Real Clear Arts.)

Insider Tips from the Art World’s Social-Media Pros

Just a few years ago most major museums’ social-media strategy consisted of a sporadically updated Facebook page and little else. Today, social media is a key aspect of art organizations’ outreach. Many institutions maintain profiles on multiple platforms, from Tumblr and Twitter to Instagram and YouTube, updating each one multiple times throughout the day. But with this expansion in the volume of content and the number of channels through which it’s posted has also come a better understanding of the role social media can play in helping museums and art organizations accomplish their goals. (Read more from Blouin Artinfo.)

A Conversation with an Artist/Nonprofit Worker about Her Money

I’m 29. I work in the communications department at a nonprofit in Manhattan and live in Brooklyn. Currently my salary is $39,750. Benefits include health insurance, life insurance (which is free via the health insurance), optional dental and vision, and 401(k). Public transit, parking, and childcare can be put on a prepaid card pre-tax. My office doesn’t participate in any federally available tax breaks for reimbursing bike expenses, which irks me since I mostly bike there. There’s also an FSA card for healthcare costs not covered by insurance, like copays and glasses. (Read more in the Billfold.)

Discovering Open-Access Art History

This article evaluates the indexing of open-access art journals in four frequently used art indexes: Art Full Text, ARTBibliographies Modern, Art and Architecture Complete, and Bibliography of the History of Art/International Bibliography of Art. The authors also compare the indexing of open-access journals in Google Scholar to that in the traditional indexes mentioned above and demonstrate that the content coverage from commercial indexes currently lags behind that of Google Scholar. This article argues that increased indexing of open-access art journals in the traditional, subject-specific indexes will be integral to their acceptance within the discipline of art history. (Read more in the Serials Librarian via Alex Watkins 123)

Help Desk: Art Fairs Everywhere

I may be in an enviable position, but it is a sticky one nonetheless. I’m getting to the position where I may be represented by multiple galleries that want to show my work at art fairs. With the rise of the art fair as a way of selling and promoting artists, how might I go about deciding which gallery will show my work at a fair? (Read more in Daily Serving.)

Academy Fight Song

This essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry. (Read more in the Baffler.)

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.

Nineteen Lessons about Teaching

1. Teaching is a learning experience. Every time I teach a lesson, I learn the material in new and deeper way. I also always learn so much from my students. I learn from their own life experiences. I learn from their insights and reactions. They see aspects all the time in the sources we use that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise—and these are awesome teaching moments. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

New Infographic: Good News in Fair Use for Libraries

A new infographic from the Association of Research Libraries tells the story of library fair use and the Code of Best Practices in a clear and compelling way. There’s an embeddable PNG for your own blogs, and there’s also a print-ready 8½ x 11 inch version in case you need hardcopies to hand out at events. (Read more in ARL Policy Notes.)

Building Digital Humanities Projects for Everyone

Earlier this summer, the American Historical Association profiled a few recipients of National Endowment for the Humanities start-up grants to see what kinds of projects were emerging from the world of digital humanities with particular applications for historians. This month the organization caught up with a new cohort of implementation grantees, recently announced by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. (Read more from the American Historical Association.)

Van Gogh in 3D? A Replica Could Be Yours for £22,000

A poster of one of Van Gogh’s sunflowers is one of the traditional adornments to a student bedroom. The rest of us hang our reproductions with the knowledge that even the good ones are far from faithful to the originals—for which the going rate is £24 million. But not anymore. The Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam has developed high-quality 3D reproductions of some of its finest paintings, with what it describes as the most advanced copying technique ever seen. (Read more in the Guardian.)

The Real Neuroscience of Creativity

You know how the left brain is realistic, analytical, practical, organized, and logical, and the right brain is creative, passionate, sensual, tasteful, colorful, vivid, and poetic? Thoughtful cognitive neuroscientists such as Rex Jung, Darya Zabelina, Andreas Fink, and others are on the forefront of investigating what actually happens in the brain during the creative process. And their findings are overturning conventional notions surrounding the neuroscience of creativity. (Read more in Scientific America.)

The Benefits of Flipping Your Classroom

A small but growing number of faculty at major universities are experimenting with the inverted or flipped classroom. It’s an instructional model popularized by, among other influences, a Ted Talk by the Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, which has received more than 2.5 million views. Institutions as varied as Duke University’s School of Medicine, Boston University’s College of Engineering, and the University of Washington School of Business are experimenting with changing from in-class lectures to video lectures and using class time to explore the challenging and more difficult aspects of course content. (Read more from Faculty Focus.)

Another Digital Divide

More students are being disciplined for sharing incendiary remarks through social media, drawing outraged responses from peers who say online interactions don’t dictate offline behavior. Despite the conflicting ideas of how students should behave on the internet, social-media etiquette is almost never discussed during first-year orientation. (Read more from Inside Higher Ed.)

Do Critics Paint Women Artists Out of the Picture?

Is there a glass ceiling for women in the arts? A glance by a visiting alien would see twenty-first-century Britain as one of the best places and times ever for women working as artists. I went to Rome for my holidays and gorged on paintings, frescoes, and statues, from ancient Roman mosaics to Canova nudes. None of these great works of art of ages gone by is credited to a woman—which doesn’t mean there were no women artists at all before modern times. (Read more in the Guardian.)