The question of what distinguishes artistic research from other forms of academic inquiry has been debated since the first doctoral programmes in the creative arts were established, and it has not yet been settled. The difficulty is not merely definitional: how institutions answer this question determines what gets funded, what gets published in research assessment exercises and, ultimately, what kind of knowledge the academy recognises as legitimate. The boundary between artistic research and conventional science is a site of institutional power as much as philosophical disagreement.
The Positivist Challenge
The sceptical position, articulated most clearly in the early years of the debate by critics writing from within the scientific establishment, holds that artistic practice cannot produce knowledge in the sense that the term carries within the natural and social sciences — that art expresses, evokes and communicates, but does not make claims that can be verified, falsified or accumulated into a body of propositional knowledge. On this view, calling artistic practice "research" is a category error that dilutes the meaning of the term and risks undermining the epistemic standards that give academic research its authority.
This position has been largely abandoned in the official discourse of European higher education — most national research councils and funding bodies now explicitly recognise artistic research as a legitimate category — but it persists in the practical assessment practices of many institutions. A researcher in the natural sciences who submits an artistic exhibition as the primary output of a funded project would still, in most contexts, be told that this does not count as research output for the purposes of performance review or promotion. The formal acceptance of artistic research at the policy level coexists with its continued marginalisation in institutional practice.
The Practice Turn in the Social Sciences
The academic legitimacy of artistic research has been strengthened by a broader intellectual shift that sociologists and philosophers of science have called the "practice turn" — the recognition, across multiple disciplines, that knowledge is not solely propositional. The work of Michael Polanyi on tacit knowledge, Donald Schön on the reflective practitioner and Bruno Latour on science as practice each contributed to an intellectual environment in which the idea that making something could be a way of knowing something became more plausible than it had seemed within the purely propositional epistemology of mid-twentieth-century positivism.
This shift created conceptual space for artistic research, but it did not resolve the question of how artistic research is distinguished from other practice-based modes of inquiry. A surgeon developing a new surgical technique, an engineer prototyping a novel structural system and a painter developing a new approach to colour field composition could all be described as producing knowledge through practice. The surgical and engineering cases, however, are typically classified as applied science, while the painter's case is classified as artistic research. The distinction rests not on the nature of the practice but on the nature of the knowledge the practice produces — and that is a distinction that remains contested.
The Epistemic Argument for Artistic Research
Proponents of artistic research as a distinct category of inquiry argue that artistic practice produces a kind of knowledge that is irreducible to the propositional knowledge of the sciences — sensory knowledge, embodied knowledge, knowledge that inheres in materials and processes rather than in statements that can be abstracted from them. A painting does not merely illustrate or communicate knowledge that could be expressed in other terms; it embodies a form of understanding that is specific to the medium, the making process and the perceptual experience it affords. On this argument, reducing artistic research to its written component — the contextualising text that accompanies an exhibition or a performance — misses the point: the research contribution is in the work itself, and the written text is supplementary, not constitutive.
This position has significant institutional implications. If artistic research produces knowledge that is irreducible to propositional form, then it cannot be adequately assessed through the same mechanisms used for written theses and published papers. Peer review, in the conventional academic sense, depends on the assumption that research contributions can be evaluated through the reading of texts by qualified reviewers. If the contribution is in the work rather than the text, then the assessment of artistic research requires different mechanisms — exhibition review by practitioner peers, critical response from audiences, analysis of the work's reception and influence over time.
The Norwegian Framework
Norway's approach to defining and evaluating artistic research is among the most developed in Europe. The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, established in 2003 and now administered by the Directorate for Higher Education and Skills, provides dedicated funding, assessment criteria and career pathways for artist-researchers working in Norwegian institutions. The programme operates on a definition of artistic research that emphasises the centrality of creative practice: artistic research, in the Norwegian framework, is research in which artistic practice is the primary vehicle for the research inquiry, and in which the artistic outcome is itself a research contribution.
The Norwegian framework has been influential beyond Scandinavia because it addresses the assessment problem that has frustrated efforts to integrate artistic research into mainstream research evaluation systems. By establishing dedicated assessment panels composed of practising artists and scholar-practitioners, by developing criteria that are specific to artistic research rather than adapted from scientific or humanities models, and by funding practice-based positions that allow artist-researchers to pursue extended inquiries within institutional structures that support rather than constrain them, the programme has demonstrated that artistic research can be institutionally viable without being assimilated to scientific norms.
An Unstable But Productive Boundary
The boundary between artistic research and other forms of academic inquiry is unlikely ever to be settled with the clarity that some institutional actors would prefer. The question of what counts as research in the arts is not a technical question with a correct answer; it is a question about what kinds of knowledge a society values, what kinds of practice it is willing to support with public funding, and what relationship it believes should exist between creative practice and the academic institutions that train practitioners and certify their expertise. These are normative questions, not empirical ones. The boundary will remain contested — and for the field of artistic research, that contestation is, in itself, a productive condition rather than a problem to be solved.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.