# Artistic Research at a crossroads

caveat: my perspective has a Western European bias, doesn't take UK and Nordic countries into account


Hito Steyerl: disturbing sign if an artist like considers artistic research a thing of the past

- obtained a PhD at an art school (Vienna) _before_ her main career as an artist, including her credit as the "most influential artist" of the world
- wrote essay on artistic research in 20..


Vienna declaration: risk of creating one's own genre of academic research art, an art system run by art schools; risk of a self-contained, self-referential system.


- problem: aligning artistic research to existing research infrastructures (including research funding), often means to fit/squeeze artistic research into mainstream university research, and apply the same validation and assessment criteria -> disservice

- to be clear: none of that what we even see as a canonical tradition of research in art (Surrealism, Situationist psychogeography, feminist institutional critique in conceptual art, up to artists like Steyerl) stands a realistic chance of obtaining research funding, or even fitting existing university PhD programs

- one could even argue that the distance of artistic research to university research has become larger in the last two decennia. 

- surrealist research in close vicinity to psychoanalysis; in the meantime, psychology has become an empirical medical discipline
- artistic research of Acéphale group around George Bataille, André Masson and the "Critical Dictionary" was done as part of a "College de Sociologie"; Benjamin's Arcades project (in its close vicinity to Surrealism and anticipation of Situationist psychogeography) was done in vinicity to the same institution, as well as to the Frankfurt School of Social Research. Today, sociology has become an empirical-scientific discipline as well, and heavily leans on quantitative methods.
- philosophy, or that what is being perceived as contemporary philosophy by artists (such as Judith Butler and Slavoj Zizek), is actually in most cases not the philosophy taught at university philosophy departments, where analytic philosophy is now even prevailing in continental Europe. 
- the humanities have gone through a quantitative turn in the past decade, and what is seen as artistic research in the digital humanities often simply boils down to data visualisation, and artists or designers as visualizers of research, not as researchers themselves.

In this light, transdisciplinarity between arts and university research is both an opportunity and a risk. The reality of available research funding will undoubtedly have a steering effect on what kind of research can be done, or is being encouraged. We already see this in the Netherlands today, where for example classical medical, social science and technological or natural science research in art school research units obtains ten times or more funding than artistic research.

Opportunity in autonomy: creating research programs, particularly PhD programs, in which artists can formulate and pursue their own research, instead of conforming to calls. Seeking validation in art practice, and art audiences, not from academia [or even worse: artistic research academia]. This is the promise and potential of the Creator Doctus.