The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

eva Luating quaLity in artistiC researCh

of creative and performing arts often include artworks and artefacts in addition to, or
instead of, the traditional written thesis.
The enormous diversity of creative production means that identifying a handful of
evaluation criteria is difficult, and evaluation systems need to be flexible in order to cater
for emerging and novel creative activities. on the other hand, the flexibility of these
arts- based criteria and systems should not preclude a strong and explicit connection
between evaluation in artistic research and evaluation in other academic subjects. it
cannot be advantageous to the arts to have special regulations, and therefore arguably
lower or unrelated standards, which are incomparable to other subjects.
in addition to the problem of the form of the outcomes and their communication,
we identify a reluctance in some quarters to be explicit about criteria and standards.
This may reflect the characteristics of the subject, which include non- verbal rather
than verbal communication, and an emphasis on subjective interpretation rather
than objective evidence- based assessment. on the latter, we note the emergence of
evidence- based assessment in areas such as healthcare as one possible route for the
evaluation of quality and performance. The swedish national agency for higher
education criticized the tacit cultures in their evaluation of the curricula at the Fine
arts colleges, having noticed that a great number of staff meetings and talks between
lecturers, supervisors and students took place without any written documentation,
feedback or evaluations. neither did the students get any written feedback by the
examiner or the external expert at the final exams:

Legal security for the individual student is highly dubious. This is particularly

apparent at [...], where the student has only one professor as supervisor and

examiner during his or her five- year course of study. Course evaluations are

fairly rare, and there is manifest confusion as regards differentiating between

evaluating the student’s performance and letting the student evaluate a

particular course module.^4

The reluctance to formulate and write down qualitative judgements exists not only
in Fine art colleges but also to a greater or lesser extent in all institutions where the
bonds between lecturer and student are strong and personal. This is the traditional
master- journeyman relation, which pierre Bourdieu called ‘charismatic pedagogy’
(Bourdieu and passeron 1979; singerman 1999). Comments, advice and judgements
about artistic qualities are of course made all the time but seldom accounted for or
written down, and are therefore hard to question or discuss. Regardless of which formal
or informal system the lecturers are using, the question is not whether it works or not
in practice, but how to transform it into a language that makes it more transparent and
communicable.

Forms of third- cycle education

The world of creative and performing arts education now boasts a bewildering array
of doctoral (third- cycle) courses and awards. our purpose in this section is to clarify
the similarities and differences between the main types of awards in order to facilitate
debate about models for the Bologna process of harmonization.