The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts

voi Ces

at worst. The reasons for this are simple: first, most people never think about the
nature of knowledge, but when they do, they tend to associate it with the progressive
accumulation of scientific knowledge – the building up of true descriptions and rational
explanations, mostly in propositional form, for how things work in our physical, social,
and cultural worlds. second, by contrast, people typically think of art in terms of
imaginative works that express and communicate emotions. Consequently, the public
is not inclined to regard art as a source of knowledge. Third, the term ‘research’ calls to
mind methods of theoretical inquiry, forms of experimentation, empirical testing, and
confirmation or disconfirmation of hypotheses in pursuit of progressively increasing
bodies of objective knowledge. Fourth, but the arts –especially the visual arts – don’t
seem to be in the proposition- stating business. people don’t recognize any counterpart
in the arts to research methods in scientific inquiry. Therefore, the whole idea of arts
research may seem oddly misconceived.
scholars in the humanities often experience a similar dismissal of their work as not
rising to the level of serious research. after all, in what sense is it ‘research’ to read what
others have written on a subject? humanists often feel this same sense of oddness when
they are asked on grant application forms to describe their methods of inquiry and types
of evidence for their project. They hardly know what to say about their ‘method’, unless
it is some dismissive humorous quip like ‘i think really hard about the nature of Being,
and then i wait for insight to come to me in a flash.’ Just as with the arts, the whole
question of method can seem a little bit out of place, and without methods of inquiry,
what sense can you make of knowledge and research? i suspect that some philosophers
often manage to get away with claiming to do research and to produce knowledge
mostly because they boldly claim to be addressing certain perennial human problems
that have no easy answers, and they then call their research ‘abstract’, ‘philosophical’,
and ‘deep’ – not easily clarified and summarized.
humanities scholars have at least one slight advantage over artists because it is
part of their job description to write long complicated articles and books that appear
to consist of propositional knowledge, even if most of it can seem incomprehensible
to ordinary folks. artists have no such crutch of quasi- propositional truth- claims, and
so they feel stumped about how to measure up to alleged rigorous standards of inquiry
and research.
i want to suggest that, in spite of these obstacles to the acknowledgment of a significant
role for art in the evocation of deep understanding, there are, nevertheless, perfectly
good notions of arts research and quite reasonable notions of inquiry in art. however,
to articulate these notions, we have to overcome a very deeply rooted traditional
conception of knowledge as a body of true propositions that capture the nature of some
particular aspect of our world. The key is to stop thinking of knowledge as an abstract
quasi- entity or a fixed body of propositional claims. instead, knowledge should be a
term of praise for success in a process for intelligently transforming experience, just as
the american philosopher John dewey argued some eighty years ago.

the prejudice against the visual arts as modes of research

so far i’ve been claiming that the chief reason the arts are not seen as research is that
they are not granted the status of knowledge producers, especially when knowledge