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Hi Ken Iım aware of some of the changes going on in Australia and to some degree they mirror changes here. I agree that these issues are not irresolvable. I just doubt they will be addressed in a manner that will benefit the creative arts. The last decade or so in the UK has been good for the creative arts in education because of changes that began in the early 1990ıs and were followed through over the next decade or so. Key to this was the creation of the Arts and Humanities Research Board (later Council) which for the first time offered substantial funding for the creative arts. Not only did it present an alternative to the Arts Council, which dithered and dwindled in its capacity to support new and experimental art practice from the late-1990ıs onwards, but with funding possibilities that dwarfed anything an independent artist could have imagined applying for from the Arts Council. Along with that was the associated change where art and design, as well as the performing arts and music, were for the first time incorporated into the Research Assessment Exercise (from 1996 onwards). From 2001 this represented a substantial cash boost, with a new type of revenue stream for art schools, allowing them to start setting up research programs supported by appropriate infrastructure. This allowed artist/academics to justify their arts practice alongside their role as a teacher as it could be presented to the RAE and earn the institution further funding. For some institutions, with significant artists on their faculty, this meant a lot of new money, money of a new type, hypothecated for research/practice. The proposals post 2009 for how research will be evaluated and funded initially looked awful. The sciences would be funded seperately through a metrics based system whilst the arts and humanities would be subject to a light touch peer review system and offered a smaller pot of money. Currently this rather extreme approach has been watered down a bit and it now seems that there will not be a split system and that peer review will play a role across all subjects. Having an integrated system will mean that interdisciplinary work will be better supported and we will not have a two track economy. The role of metrics is yet to be settled for the arts and humanities but they will play a role. This is where problems lie. I cannot see how being cited in a handful of academic journals will be something most artist/practitioners will want to pursue. This model is founded on a text-based publication model of research which is not applicable to practice based research. If this is implemented what will happen (it is already happening) is that there will be startup pseudo-scientific journals designed to publish the sort of texts that can emerge from a practice based approach to research. I am not going to name the journals like this that already exist but I for one do not read them (even when I am published in them) as I do not see how they relate to my interests or the broader interests of arts practitioners. They are a cynical exercise and an example of how people will find novel solutions to problems, even when those solutions offer little value aside from contributing to generating a revenue stream. As for the artworld and art market...I am equally cynical about that. Like you I have chosen to ally myself with academe in order to remove myself from the strictures of having to sell my art. I have been there before, having a gallery dealer, the glitzy openings, chatting with potential buyers. Most unpleasant. When I started making weird installations instead of nice paintings my dealer got very uncomfortable (that was the early 80ıs) but she continued to show my work (good for her). However, she was doing this out of the kindness of her heart, not from good business sense. I felt this was an inappropriate context for my work and since then I have only ever shown in non-profit or public spaces. I have not knowingly sold an artwork from an exhibition since (although I will admit to doing a few commissions). Academia, especially since it was funded to undertake practice based creative arts research, has become very attractive to many artists because it offers a financial and professional model where they do not have to a day job as well. They are effectively paid to do their own work within a new context, away from the art market. That seems like a really good deal for everyone the practitioner/researchers, the institutions and the students. What we have seen emerge from this are novel artistic practices as artists have explored collaborations with subject areas they previously were challenged to connect with, artworks more focused on process than product and new ways of positioning the artwork relative to its audience. I think it has been an exciting and experimental period. I am just not sure how much longer the framework that has supported this will continue to function. Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art [log in to unmask] www.eca.ac.uk [log in to unmask] www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: Ken Friedman <[log in to unmask]> Reply-To: <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 14 May 2008 09:24:58 +0200 To: <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Re: [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] New Models of Academic Publishing 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.