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Conclusion: The Next 100 Years
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239 The work of a learned society is a complex affair that requires balancing the general professional needs and concerns of a diverse membership with the specific support of individual opportunities for creative and scholarly production. The College Art Association in this regard is little different than the dozens of other groups that negotiate those rocky shoals, pressured by external economic and social changes on the one hand while attending to internal exertions of force to move the organization on the other. Yet, as the contributions in this volume have shown, the dynamic development of artists, art historians, and visual arts professionals in the last hundred years has been a unique experience. With not a few moments of tension and conflict, the CAA has nevertheless become a place where professional standards in the arts can be codified, the latest in art scholarship published, the member’s voice heard through our diverse governance structures, and a site in which advocacy issues from all perspectives can be magnified in their impact with the powerful backing of the organization and its members. These various strands are often brought together in the messy creativity of the conference itself, a cacophony of artistic and art historical voices that have made for the life-blood of the institution in the last century. Yet as Edward Bellamy reminds us, looking backward inevitably means imagining the future. While the next century will certainly entail fantastic changes in the arts and whole new areas of art historical scholarship, it is unlikely that we could prognosticate on the nature of those changes with any hope of being exact. After all, who could have predicted a hundred years ago the scholarly emphasis that we find today even in the Art Bulletin? Beginning primarily as a journal Conclusion The Next 100 Years paul b. jaskot 240 ∏ Paul B. Jaskot devoted to publishing course outlines and pedagogic tips for presenting art in the classroom, it encapsulated the early goals of the organization. As President John Pickard stated in 1917, “the question of primary importance before this Association today is the great question of placing art instruction in the college curriculum in such a manner that it shall have a vital and effective influence upon the education and the lives of the entire student body.”1 The Art Bulletin served this goal until Parnassus took over that role. In the early days of Art Journal, it too reflected a predominantly pedagogic focus, with its interest centered on arts education until it became more theoretically and historically oriented with its name change in the 1960s.2 This publishing emphasis on pedagogy has also been complemented by a variety of sessions at the conference and, of course, in our Education Committee. This all reflects on one of the issues deemed of high importance to the founders, the “college” in CAA. Looking forward, though, how central is the role of pedagogy to our institutional identity, even if it is still central to the majority of our membership, whether in the university or museum environment? More broadly, who will our imagined audience be through the next decades? What tensions exist, if any, in our goals to engage and define the most important creative, intellectual debates in the field and our desire to address a predominantly nonspecialist audience both within the student body and in the population at large? Can the organization maintain a focus on educational institutions? Should it? As indicated in these pages, thinking about the important role CAA has played and continues to play in defining standards and guidelines for artists and art historians in educational professions, broadly construed, will help guarantee the viability of the organization into the future. But such thinking will also test our flexibility as the educational environment itself rapidly changes. Not only are scholarly and creative categories expanding in new global ways, but there is also an increasing overlap between the conceptual work done by artists and that of art historians, as has been noted by several contributors. For example, CAA now has a category of membership entitled “World Art,” Art Journal is increasingly looking at art produced by and for artists and audiences outside of dominant market centers, and the largest category of jobs for art history last year was in contemporary art. After all, contemporary artists tend to be focused on problems and aesthetic innovations that come out of their own experience or research into globalization that is shared as...