![]() My own focus is not on the neoliberal university context, since this has been much discussed already, along with the attempt to analyze artistic research-a broader historical category of which I take research-based art to be a recent subset-in terms of knowledge production and epistemology. 3 Yet as Elkins points out, very few influential texts or manifestos by artists of the past would ever have earned their writers a doctorate, because some of the best writing by artists has been dogmatic and impulsive rather than laboriously researched and peer-reviewed. For artist Hito Steyerl, “artistic research” has even become a new discipline, one that normalizes, regulates, and ensures the repetition of protocols. Another is that art, under the pressure of academicization, becomes tame, systematic, and professional. One is that it exacerbates hierarchies of economic privilege already endemic to art education. There are many reasons to be skeptical of the Ph.D.-in-fine-art boom. Installation view, MACBA, Barcelona, 2015. Dora Garcia, Exhausted Books, 2002, mixed media. Even if they don’t have doctorates, the intellectual milieu of these programs informs their work, along with the broader conscription of education to neoliberal systems of value (such as “return on investment” and “measurable impact”). ![]() While some of the artists I discuss later were born outside the West, they have all passed through art schools in Europe or North America. 2 Unlike master-of-fine-arts degrees (the usual higher-education qualification for artists), doctoral programs generally expect that artistic practice be supplemented by written research-either as a separate but related dissertation or made legible within the artwork itself. According to a 2012 survey conducted by art historian James Elkins, seventy-three institutions in Europe offered Ph.D.s in studio art, forty-two of which were in the UK alone-striking statistics when compared with the five in Canada, seven in the US, and four in Brazil. Although research-based art is a global phenomenon, it is inseparable from the rise of doctoral programs for artists in the West, specifically in Europe, in the early ’90s. That said, changes in art education have arguably been a more decisive influence than any of these forebears. The chief antecedents of research-based art are not difficult to identify: photodocumentary captioning in the tradition of Lewis Hine the film essay as defined by Hans Richter and practiced by auteurs ranging from Chris Marker to Harun Farocki and the interdisciplinary Conceptualism of artists like Mary Kelly, Susan Hiller, and Hans Haacke (who in the ’70s engaged with psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sociology, respectively). It has much in common with other trends that have arisen since the 1990s, such as the artist-curated exhibition and the “archival turn,” but it is not fully congruent with either. But it has never been clearly defined-or, for that matter, critiqued. Today, research-based art is nothing novel its presence is almost mandatory in any serious exhibition.
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