foundationsthe area of artistic R&d had not been understood and complied with by the collegia,
intentionally or for other reasons. They also suggested that the actual basic idea, as
such, was conventional and fruitless:
This is because as conceived by us it was based on the hope that organised
encounters between art and science would bring about the creative
environments that would result in a corpus of texts and other results. several
of the collegia have pointed out that the collegium model lacks solid support
among the university colleges of fine arts, and that the ‘encounters’ between
art and science are based on dichotomies that tend to lock the status quo
instead of promoting the emergence of a new research field on its own terms.
(Karlsson 2007: 164f.)The judgement is probably true. But one of the reasons for the strategy to give grants
for encounters between artistic researchers and the traditional academic community
was to pre- empt the criticism coming from the representatives of established research
areas. This in turn indicated that the idea to allocate funds for practice- based artistic
research under the structure of a research council for humanities and social sciences
was mistaken in the first place, at least as long as suspicion is palpable on both sides of
this research divide.
The prevailing suspicion, which is closely linked to the assessment of quality in
practice- based research, has been wisely commented upon by henk Borgdorff:
a pressing, but less widely debated, issue is the assessment of quality in artistic
research. it is pressing because a sometimes understandable scepticism exists
in both the art world and academia about the results of such research –
either the art produced or the justification of the knowledge gained. more
particularly, if the artistic outcomes of the research should fall short of what
counts as worthwhile and meaningful in the art world, artistic research would
lose its rationale; one would then be justified in asking what the point of the
whole enterprise is. This scepticism is fuelled by experiences with artistic phd
research projects over the past 10 years or so, which have not always been
convincing, to put it mildly. This threat to artistic research is even more critical
than the scepticism from within academia, where one might expect some
resistance anyway (as the emancipation process of other research domains in
the history of science has shown us).
(Borgdorff 2009b)in their closing remarks the swedish evaluators recommended the building of
bridges between the colleges of fine arts and the closely related arts disciplines, the
purpose being to eliminate once and for all the misunderstandings and distrust that
prevail between them. This distrust seemed to have increased, rather than decreased,
since support for artistic R&d was introduced:
progressive development of artistic research is possible only if there is
collaboration with the closely related artistic disciplines, and both parties