Hi, Simon,
This is a significant challenge, but not unsolvable. Australia is likely
moving to metrics, so we are wrestling with this here, too, or we will be
soon.
The challenge would be to establish a metric that works for creative,
exhibiting and performing arts. Just as peer review takes place at the
journal level in publishing metrics, something similar happens in the arts
already. The question is how to formalize it.
Without saying that it is perfectly possible, the late Dr. Willi Bongaard
did something much like this with his Kunstkompass, and the kind of system
he used could easily be expanded.
Just about to dash, so I won't answer Roger's note (got to think!) or your
reply, but I will say that in visual art, at least, it seems very difficult
to avoid the influence of the market. I do not like that fact -- but then,
I
observe that very few artists turn down a sale or make career moves that
will harm their market.
One reason I like having a day job is the fact that I have always been
quite
free to follow my interests as an artist. The corollary is that there have
been times when I am quite visible followed by times (often long) when my
work vanishes from the public eye. My day job as -- first as a management
professor, now as dean of a design faculty -- also insulates me from the
pressure that I would feel as a teaching artist whose university required
me
to emulate the market through some form of evaluation. Reputation is also a
market factor, at least when reputation is linked to job, promotion, and
pay
scale.
Whether market forces or metrics, peer review or making your living another
way, Bob Dylan had it right: We've all got to serve somebody. I've chosen
service in a different line of work as the price of freedom from the
masters
that other artists serve.
But on the issue of metrics, allowing they are hard to avoid, I think we
could well develop a metric scale for creative, performing, and exhibiting
arts.
Warm wishes,
Ken
On Tue, 13 May 2008 09:21:48 +0100, Simon Biggs <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>For artists and arts institutions who are engaged in (and whose academic
>jobs are to a large measure justified by) research this will make an
>interesting challenge. If the role of peer review in the UK research
>evaluation exercise is diminished or replaced by a citation index how will
>the current system, where artefacts and exhibitions can be evaluated as
>research outcomes, function? Is this the end, in the UK, of recognising
the
>creative arts and their native modalities of outcome as research (as
opposed
>to research about the creative arts)? If that is the case then numerous
>initiatives that many of us here have engaged with, including things like
>CRUMB, will be potentially compromised.
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