After a VERY busy past couple of weeks, I am glad to be getting back to the round up once again. Midterms are stacked high on my desk and many emails need answering, but I wanted to post some great links to material that has been getting my attention the past week or more in my feeds.

First, there is a great deal of conversation and debate in my particular discipline the past several days regarding the UK's decision to remove art history as a subject from the secondary school A-Level exams (equivalent to the Advanced Placement courses in North America). Many prominent art historians, art critics, artists, and others in the art world have come forward since the news broke to share their thoughts on the importance of the field, and art history's many connections to cultural understanding and the current creative economy. It reminds me of the firestorm a few years back when Barack Obama used an analogy about trades training, and questioned the relevance of an art history degree for the job market. So many people ended up writing, tweeting, and speaking up about the value of the discipline that Obama ended up retracting and apologizing for the comment. If you go to Twitter and check out the hashtag #whyarthistorymatters, you will see many fantastic reasons!

The second story that had everyone talking this week was the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to Bob Dylan. First, there was the outrage voiced from many in the elite literary community that Dylan simply did not qualify for the award (as a popular musician) and was a poor choice, and then there was the lack of response from Dylan himself upon being notified by the Nobel committee of the award. What I love about this development is how much it reveals about the gap that still exists between what is characterized as "high" and "low" art in the literary world-- something that the art world also likes to pretend doesn't exist as much as it clearly does. Dylan's silence (a radical gesture in and of itself) is not at all a surprise to me. In fact, I kind of love it.