Art and Artistic Research: Music, Visual Art, Design, Literature, Dance (review)

Research in art—also called research through art, practice-led or practice-based artistic research—is now clearly established as something very different from art tout court, on the one hand, and research on art (art history, art theory, art criticism) on the other hand. However, the practical implications of this newly institutionalized area are still under heavy debate. Promoters of this type of research insist on the right of artists to "do a Ph.D." (although this is just the tip of the iceberg) and to benefit from funding possibilities until now strictly reserved to traditional academic disciplines. Critics underline the incompatibility between artistic experience and academic streamlining and managing of research, emphasizing the illusion of giving an added value to real art through theoretical, academic methods and procedures. The primary keyword in the whole process is "academization," for, at least in Europe, the reform of higher education has produced (in the U.K.) or is producing (on the Continent) a radical merger of the university and non-university types of education, and this evolution is not something that can be stopped. The second keyword is "arts and sciences," more particularly the "two cultures debate," which has been dynamicized by these changes in artistic training in universities.

As the bibliography listed at the end of this rich volume clearly demonstrates, discussion and publication on research in art have become a booming business. The advantage of this sudden flow of conferences, seminars, special issues, books and courses within the new programs is that it is no longer possible to start discussion from scratch, innocently repeating the same slogans, fears, hopes, desires and frustrations. One must now take into account a growing body of knowledge as well as a certain number of landmark texts, methodological statements, best practices, artists' careers and even theoretical works that have moved from the margins to the very center of the discussion: Everybody is now following with great anxiety the wording of the British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) definition of research in fine arts, just as everyone is rereading the special issue of the Dutch Journal of Music Theory (Vol. 12-1, 2007) on "Practice-Based Research in Music," after having rediscovered classic voices such as those of Christoph Schenker or Christopher Frayling.

What strikes one most in this new volume is first of all the importance of the philosophical metadiscourse that is mobilized by the authors to make their point: Danto, Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, for instance, are all over the place, and this overrepresentation of the postmodern art-theoretical doxa is a symptom that the field is still far from having constituted its own frame of reference. Moreover, these theoretical authorities seem to be shared by all categories of contributors: administrators, teachers, critics and theoreticians, but also the artists themselves. A second aspect that may come as a surprise is the exemplarily European dimension of the discussion. Unlike many other disciplines, where the Bologna BA-MA reform has not dismantled national preferences and traditions, the discipline of research in art seems eager to wipe out local constraints as much as possible in order to achieve from the very beginning a common ground on what training, teaching and thinking in this new kind of research is supposed to be.

In general, one can only admit that the quality of the ongoing debate is good and that the strong commitment of the participants to the achievement of a common goal—i.e. the equality between research in art and research on art—does not imply sloppy thinking and hasty, one-dimensional argumentation. The essays gathered in this volume are honest and mostly quite challenging. They are well documented, they often ask the right questions, they do not provide us with all the answers and they demonstrate that conference papers...