Dear Terry,

The thread responding to your questions is quite interesting. As so
often happens on the list, it spun of intriguing subsidiary questions.
Nevertheless, the original questions deserve an answer. 

1) The applicant claims articles as his or her own publications in
which other authors mention his or her work.

1) The answer to the first question does not depend on common or
accepted practice in art departments. The answer to this question
involves general standards for attribution of publications under
research policy across all universities in all fields.

An author may claim as his or her own publications only those
publications that he or she writes as author or co-author. Nothing
else.

When another author cites an author or artist, mentions the work or
discusses it, the publication is credited to the author whose name
appears on the work, not the individual whose work is cited. 

An applicant who claims authorship of a text that cites his or her work
is mistaken. It sounds as though the student is confused. To me, this
suggests that the student lacks some of the basic skills and background
knowledge that he or she will need to succeed in a PhD program.

This is not plagiarism, though. This is misattribution. If one were to
claim the writings of other people as one’s own writings on a job
application, it would constitute a serious problem. If it’s clear that
the author of the publication claimed is someone other than the
applicant, however, the problem is ignorance or stupidity, not
misattribution. 

If an artist claims that an essay or article about his or her work is
in some way his or her publication, that is a mistake. If the artist
replaces the author’s name with his or her own name, this constitutes
academic fraud.

If you have any question on this, check with the Research Office at
your university. 

2. The artist claims that all of her or her artworks are research.

2. This is simply odd. What is the basis of the claim?

In general, I’d argue that this must be mistaken. Let’s take
surgery as an analogy. In an earlier post, I mentioned an uncle – a
physician and medical doctor with an MD degree who went back to
university to earn a PhD so that he could engage in fruitful research.
If he performed a specific kind of surgical procedure a thousand times,
it would have made him a better surgeon and physician, but not all
instances of this practice could have been research.

To place this in perspective, consider the evidence on surgical success
rates for specific procedures. Success rates for any given procedure are
higher in hospitals where a specific surgeon working with the same
surgical team performs a specific procedure more often than at hospitals
where different surgeons perform the operation. Success rates decline
further where different surgeons perform an operation with changing
teams. If you need open heart surgery, you will clearly do better to
choose a surgeon with a stable team with 300 or 400 operations to their
credit, doing a reasonable average number of operations every month for
the past three or four years. Practice improves skills – but it is not
research.

One must ask what this artist has been doing if every artwork is a
research effort. And one must wonder about the level of his or her
skill. In some fields such as conceptual art or certain intermedia
fields, skill may not be relevant. In media arts or painting, it may.
Just as one needs a reasonable degree of proficiency in chemistry,
mathematics, or information design to work at the post-graduate level,
the same is true in many art fields. 

If every single artwork the applicant has made is research, it means
that each of the artworks is an experiment. If this is so, the artist
may be a budding Leonardo. Or perhaps he or she is merely ignorant and
lacks the skills requisite for an artistic contribution. 

This is different to the statement that this applicant lacks some of
the skills he or she needs for research education. We already know this
based on bibliographic misattribution. Here, I ask whether this
applicant even has the skill needed for an ordinary master’s degree in
art. It seems odd that every artwork should constitute research, making
each an experiment. Hasn’t the artist provided any simple competent
examples of artistic practice that don’t raise new questions or break
new ground as research would be expected to do?

Why don’t you ask the applicant to amplify the application by stating
explicitly what research he or she did in each of these artworks?

Yours,

Ken

Professor Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Dean, Faculty of Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

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Terry Love writes:

I’m acting as a 2nd assessor on some doctoral scholarship
applications for an Art department.  A couple of things have surprised
me and I’d welcome advice on whether they are common/acceptable
practice in the Art realm.  

1. Claiming as one’s own publications when one’s work is mentioned
in publications authored by others.

2. Claiming all one’s artworks as research.