Peer Review in the Arts: How Institutions Actually Evaluate Practice-Based Research

When a scientist submits a journal article, the peer review process is relatively well understood: qualified reviewers assess methodology, evidence and originality against established disciplinary standards. Practice-based artistic research has no equivalent consensus. A completed painting, a staged performance or a durational installation cannot be peer reviewed in quite the same way as a data set and a results section, and the field has spent the better part of two decades building infrastructure to do it anyway.

The Research Catalogue and Exposition-Based Publishing

The most concrete answer so far is the Research Catalogue, an online publishing platform developed by the Society for Artistic Research and used, among other outlets, by the Journal for Artistic Research, founded in 2011. Rather than forcing artists to translate their work into conventional prose, the Research Catalogue allows researchers to build "expositions" that weave together images, video, audio, scores and text into a single non-linear document. A choreographer can embed rehearsal footage next to a theoretical reflection; a sound artist can attach a mixed-down composition to a discussion of its compositional logic. The journal then runs these expositions through an actual double-blind peer review process, with reviewers assessing the exposition as a coherent piece of research communication, not just judging the artwork on its own terms.

Who Sits on the Panel

Doctoral assessment panels in artistic research typically mix roles that would rarely sit together in a conventional PhD defence: a practising artist with an international exhibition or performance record, an art historian or theorist, and often a supervisor from an adjacent discipline such as sound engineering, dance science or architecture. The candidate is usually examined on two things at once — a written or otherwise documented reflection, sometimes called an exegesis, and the artistic work itself, staged, exhibited or screened as part of the defence. Examiners are expected to weigh the two together: does the practice demonstrate something the writing could not have shown alone, and does the writing illuminate decisions the work itself leaves implicit?

Norway's Fellowship Model

Norway addressed the mismatch between artistic research and the conventional PhD by building a parallel track. The Norwegian Artistic Research Programme, established in 2003, funds multi-year fellowships at art academies and conservatoires that run alongside, rather than inside, the university PhD system, with results published through the same Research Catalogue infrastructure used internationally. Sweden has taken a related but distinct approach through PARSE, a research platform and biennial conference hosted by the University of Gothenburg since 2015, which treats peer exchange at conferences as a legitimate form of review alongside formal publication.

Why the System Still Divides Opinion

Critics on both sides remain unconvinced. Some traditional academics argue that exposition-based review lets subjective, unreplicable work masquerade as research; some artists argue that the entire apparatus — expositions, examiners, catalogues — forces intuitive practice into a bureaucratic shape it never needed. What keeps the field moving is less a resolved consensus than a shared, pragmatic acknowledgment: if artistic research wants funding, university recognition and doctoral status, it needs mechanisms that look enough like peer review to satisfy the institutions built around it, even while quietly rewriting what review actually means.