The CAA which holds it’s yearly conference in Chicago is this weekend and to give a face to the economic downturn (and nightmares to every newly minted MFA looking for a teaching position) they realesed a report detailing the decline in positions from FY2008 to FY2009. In short we are talking almost a 38% decline across the board.

Ceramics & Fiber continue the steepest decline posting around 40% and Sculpture/Installation/Environmental Art posts a surprising growth of 125%. Art History continues to be the most resistant to overall change but still shows growth in Asian studies at the limited expense of Modernism/20th Century American Art.

More detailed data (including state by state breakdowns) and the entire report can be seen here

Studio Art	FY09	FY08
Any	629	1,005
Graphic/Industrial/Object	185	246
Digital/Media/Animation	150	220
Drawing/Printmaking/Paper	96	130
Sculpture/Installation/Environmental Art	92	99
Ceramics/Metals/Fiber	89	92
Photography	85	143
Art Education	73	90
Film/Video	70	89
Foundations	59	90

What general forms of knowledge are most important for people to have today? What fields of study have become irrelevant? Are there emerging areas of human inquiry that warrant greater (or even just some) inclusion in today’s institutions of higher education?

These are some of the questions asked by Robin Sloane, Matt Thompson, and Tim Carmody, the founders and contributors to Snarkmarket. They’ve collectively offered some new takes on what has increasingly been dismissed as an outdated concept–namely, a generalized “liberal arts” course of study in college or university–by crowd-sourcing answers to the question of what a “twenty-first century way of doing the liberal arts” would be.  You can read some of the initial proposals here (scroll down to the comments).

Those ideas that made the cut have been compiled into a book, co-published with Revelator Press and titled New Liberal Arts, which aims to “expand and invigorate our notions of the liberal arts.” Course proposals include “Attention Economics,” “Inaccuracy,” “Journalism,” “Food,” “Myth and Magic,” and “Genderfuck.” The book was first published in print form but is now available as a free downloadable .pdf that can be distributed and “remixed” freely.

In the spirit of the product itself, here’s a free sample: a proposal for a course on “Brevity,” written by Gavin Craig:

BREVITY

140 characters is the new 30 seconds. 30 seconds is forever.
Anything important is worth saying quickly. By the time it has been said, it is already the past, and so the saying must become a moment of its own. Brevity is urgency and modesty at once. Attention is the scarcest resource. Millions are dying and we have only seconds.
The right word is worth a thousand words.
Brevity is representation and not description.
Show and don’t tell becomes a truth and not a cliché when video can be posted instantaneously. The message must place the reader in the moment, and since the moment is unavailable, the message must place the reader in the message.

Now.
(Not then, not later. There is no later.)
This is not the victory of form over content. The stakes are much higher than that.

If you want to download a copy of New Liberal Arts now, click here.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

download

This week: First we had James Elkins and the raiders of the lost ark, then James Elkins and the temple of doom, next James Elkins and the last crusade….now.

James Elkins and the crystal something-or-other.

No, no, But James Elkins is back to talk with Duncan about the Stone Summer Theory Institute, the Art Phd. and why your sorry ass is going to be in school forever.
Stone Summer Theory Institute at SAIC: What Is an Image?

From July 13-19, the second annual Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will present a forum for some of the world’s foremost art theoreticians to address unsolved issues in the field.

This year’s Institute is focused on three fundamental questions: What is the nature of the visual? What are images? What are pictures?

A combination of public events and private discussions, the Summer Theory Institute invites fifteen young scholars to explore issues in art conceptualization with renowned international scholars, artists, and authors, this year including Gottfried Boehm, W.J.T. Mitchell, Jacqueline Lichtenstein, and Marie-Jose Mondzain.

ALSO: WEST COAST PEOPLE READ AND OBEY!

In conjunction with “Open for Business”, Brian and Patrica will interview René de Guzman live in public at Triple Base Gallery on Thursday, July 10th at 5:00 PM. The raw interview will then be posted to the site as that week’s show.

René de Guzman is the senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California. Previously, he was the director of visual arts at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA).
[Read more]

Three students from the Royal Academy Schools were astonished yesterday when the man who made the fortunes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers picked their entire graduation show.

Mr Saatchi, 65, snapped up five cutout cartoon characters by Angus Sanders-Dunnachie, 28, the total price of which was £7,900; seven of ten landscapes by Jill Mason, 33, each priced at up to £600; and all 13 paintings by Carla Busuttil, 26, which were priced between £450 and £2,500.

Mr Saatchi had asked for a discount, but none of the students wanted to reveal how much they had agreed to.

Via Brett Sokol for New York Magazine:

If the glory, freneticism, excess, and sunny evanescence of the current contemporary-art boom has a symbolic home, it’s Miami Beach. Thanks to the appearance of an exponentially more fabulous Art Basel Miami Beach fair each December since 2002, the once-tattered resort town has gained a new sense of itself as an aesthetic destination that goes beyond the mere appreciation of a set of well-wrought silicone implants. Now members of the local Establishment, enamored with their smart new friends—collectors, artists, and curators from around the world—want to see if they can get them to stick around. It’s partly about wishing to be taken seriously as a cultural alternative to New York and Los Angeles. But it’s also a bet that fertilizing the creative class is good economic-development policy—especially in a city hit hard by the real-estate meltdown. Which is why a local developer and collector, Craig Robins, is starting a free postgraduate art program in Miami.
[Read more]

Next Page »