Flight of the “Artademics”: Scholarly Gentrification and Conceptual+Art Discourses

As the debate continues about arts-based research as a mode of academic practice, a number of key issues permeate scholarship concerning quality, rigor, and responsibility, resulting in an opportunity to rethink and redefine how we are potentially moving toward greater social, political, and intellectual consciousness through the arts and arts-based research (Slattery, 2003). My deliberation is meant to provoke a conversation about the fluid parameters of this still-emerging discourse, and how the intricate metamorphosis of conceptual+art may warrant deeper consideration and debate among researchers. To open this dialogue, I borrow the concept of gentrification from social geography as a means to examine more critically how academics are framing scholarship through the arts and why the actions of arts researchers may change broader notions of art as research.

Much has been written concerning the close ties of artists and higher education in relation to gentrification (for example, Bridge, 2001; Peck, 2005). Suggesting academics may be among “different sorts of gentrifiers,” a group I refer to as artademics, presents an alternate way of thinking about the nature of the arts by interpreting patterns of movement within scholarship (Redfern, 2003). This raises a series of key questions: Do artademics gentrify the discourse of arts-based research? Are artists denied spaces to circulate their works and ideas because artademics are filling those spaces? And, if as Lees (1999) suggests, “academics have become conformist [and] complacent,” is there a potential for artademics to inadvertently instill a culture of sameness in spaces previously noted for uncertainty (pp. 377–378)? Given the rhetoric of self-evolution and social justice in art education, how do artademics so closely tied to these issues reconcile the impact of engaging in the arts as scholarship? Should there be a critique set in a healthy skepticism about the role and the art works of academics in relation to conceptual+art?

Although gentrification is often cast as a positive change, I am also interested in exploring the dubious aspects in this conversation. For example, motivated by “notions of status,” the processes underway concerning artademics may well parallel what Redfern (2003) describes as the historical gentrification of professions such as lawyers and doctors in the 19th century that came to be treated “literally like the gentry” (pp. 2355–2356). In the present day, academics may seek new associations through conceptual+art to enhance understandings of self and social status in a new neo-liberal period where economic, political, and public success is closely tied to creativity (Peck, 2005). In the academy, some may feel ranked behind those in sciences and other professional practices, and the arts can serve as a means to negotiate a sense of difference in the new era, making identity “precisely about recognition, honour and respect” (Redfern, 2003, p. 2359). In this way, artademics position art as a cultural commodity through the vehicle of the academy. This may result in a new order that potentially displaces artists as activists from the very conversations that artademics as theorists are striving to facilitate. In effect, I question if artademics encroach on artists under the auspices of conceptually based art practices, making higher education+art valuable credentials in funding opportunities as well as in securing venues outside of the academy, which may facilitate even more opportunities and greater access to publishing and exhibiting than academics already possess. In this way it may be argued that academics are displacing traditional artist voices through their proximity to systems of knowledge distribution, resulting in a kind of artful sprawl in the academy that then in wider society “glamorizes” the artademic through “aesthetic valorization” (Cole, 1987; Cameron & Coaffee, 2005, p. 40). By disseminating scholarship through art, “tensions in structure and agency” occur when a group like this “deploy their considerable cultural capital” to restructure a “habitus” of social relationships (Bridge, 2001, pp. 205–207). Because artademics reinforce these values through “autonomy,” and then determine what constitutes “prestige,” there is a potential to subvert the roles of practicing artists even if partnering with leaders in the arts (Ley, 2003, p. 2531). The situating and positioning of artademics pushes these boundaries...