WORKSHOP RIJKSAKADEMIE----------------------

ART AND METHOD(Preliminary Statement)

Henk Slager

In the topical practice of visual art, artists increasingly consider their activities a form of research. Moreover, the

concept of research appears to play a crucial role in today's redefinition of advanced art education, where, similar to

established, academic research schools and institutions, one has begun to think in terms of research projects and PhD

degrees. Therefore, more than ever, it is urgent to reflect on the specificity of artistic research, whether institutionalized or not. In particular, differences and relationships with respect to other forms of established (alpha, beta, and gamma)

research should be investigated. The question, then, arises as to which criteria define artistic research.

Obviously, research conducted by artists is not characterized by an objective, empirical approach, since art indeed does not strive for generalization, repeatability, and quantification. Rather, artistic research is directed towards

unique, particular, local knowledge. In that sense, it seamlessly connects with Baumgarten's classic definition of the aesthetic domain where "aesthetic knowledge is knowledge about the singular; it cannot be generalized into laws, and it

applies to the singular and unique, but it is still knowledge." However, the emphasis on the unique in the aesthetic domain

does not imply that research is impossible, as philosopher of science Karl Popper maintains. After all, artistic research does satisfy a number of fundamental research criteria, such as focus on communication, a (self) critical attitude, and emphasis on autonomous research. This implies that each

separate artistic research project should make explicit why the

research in question takes place in the domain of art and what tools are employed. The research project should make clear that

research's object art could be an "epistemological engine" (Sarat Maharaj, Dokumenta XI), i.e., a power capable of producing new, differential forms of knowledge.

The epistemological perspective of uniqueness and

otherness demands a further methodological contemplation. Indeed, different from established forms of research, the path

of artistic research and its implied production of knowledge cannot easily be defined. Therefore, artistic research (and the

institutions admitting such research in their curriculum) should continually insert a meta-perspective and critically

reflect both the position and temporary situation of the research project. Strikingly enough, such methodology could be

considered a form of mapping. Only afterwards can one determine that the methodological process deployed has been entirely mapped - similar to how philosophy in generating new concepts differs from other forms of research, Cf. Deleuze and Guattari

What is Philosophy. However, during the process as such the researcher works merely with temporary, flexible constructions

evolving from contextuality and interpretation and connected with an awareness of being in the world or the human condition. Is it true that the methodology of artistic research can be described as an experimental form of hermeneutics?

LIQUID KNOWLEDGE

Annette Balkema

In an interview in L&B 16, Exploding Aesthetics, Maria Lind -

curator of the What If exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm - once mentioned that visual art generates a particular kind of knowledge. Most people working in the field of visual art would agree although no one, I believe, would be able to explain what that knowledge might entail. Lind now

works in Munich where she continues her Think Tank projects

with artists, urban planners and other professionals from the visual field. Does visual art need think tanks in order to

elucidate the particular knowledge it generates? Professionals sensitive to what happens in the domain of visual art can do without them. After all, perception or the trained gaze is the main discovery tool in visual art. The gaze is indeed some sort

of knowledge machine. However, think tanks, such as this workshop today, could indeed be interesting tools for

generating new ideas. Visual art's interest in urbanism - implying incisions in

the urban environment together with architects and urban planners - is one of the forms of collaboration to have emerged

in the visual art field during the second part of the 1990s with artists such as Appolonia Sustersic. In addition to new

forms of collaboration, other themes appeared last decade, such as the search for new audiences in for example music festivals (Planet Art), researching the moving image in combination with other visual work (Tiong Ang), and examining the streaming

image and novel technologies such as interactivity in media art-type work. Last week I saw in media art gallery The Kitchen

in New York artists such as Camille Utterback and her Liquid Time Series - which has been presented as well in our own Montevideo in Amsterdam - and Scott Snibbe with Frames. The Kitchen announced these two works as the exploration of

interactivity as a digital experience triggered by ordinary gestures such as pointing, walking and looking. Themes of The Kitchen's lectures in February are Digital Happy Hour with filmmaker, author, and editor Grahame Wienbren, and

Interactivity and Time, the effects of interactivity on the experience of time in hypertext, music and games.

All of these themes mentioned are signals from the world of visual art staking out research areas. And I am sure every artist has in addition a particular individual theme or themes: I only have to think of the books I came across in artists' studios with titles ranging from cartography, the mechanism of

the human body, to Deleuze's A Thousand Plateaus. Thus, it is

quite amazing that urban planners, architects, film directors, physicists such as Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History

of Time, Julian Barbour, author of The End of Time, and physicists working on novel areas such as superstring theory, clinical psychologists specializing in perception, and Deleuzian and Merleau-Pontian philosophers do not give regular

workshops and are not regular studio visitors at advanced art schools such as the Rijksakademie. Obviously, visual artists do

not need to transform into architects, physicists or philosophers. I do believe, though, that the field of visual

art and the other fields I mentioned could be mutually inspiring while working in new forms of collaboration and new

forms of think tanks. Such collaborations could be the basis for experimental artistic research projects and produce liquid

forms of artistic knowledge.

Beware of Research (This text is a recorded and edited version of the workshop

talk)

Gerard de Vries

In my view, philosophy is the business of making distinctions. That is exactly what I am going to do in this discussion on

whether artistic work could be viewed as a form of research. There are several lines one could follow in such discussion. Of course, one could ask what art communicates, what its cognitive content comprises, and what one could learn from artistic

productions. Another line of argument could go into certain similarities between the development in the sciences and the

development in the arts. I decided, though, to start the other way around and to ask, "What is research"? Well, the least one could say is that not every experiment or every discovery is research. A kid experimenting with drugs is not doing research. A police investigation with many discoveries is still not

called research. To me the paradigmatic case of research, the

true example of research concerns, of course, the sciences.Having said that, the first problem one encounters is that

there is a wide variety of sciences. Science comes in all kinds of sorts and modes. A physicist, a mathematician, a historian, and a biologist do not necessarily have much in common in their research. Nevertheless, I do think that in spite of the

different conceptions of doing science, there is a vague though common concept: scientific research is connected, on the one

hand, to what I would call a lofty epistemological ideal, namely the search for truth or the search for objective,

certified knowledge, the goal one wants to attain if you will, and, on the other hand, the daily practice of working along in

laboratories and archives. A theory about research is a theory about the connection between these two aspects of science. How

does one link the daily practice of researchers in a laboratory to lofty ideals such as truth? One could assume that people work in laboratories because they want to know the truth. For a long time the philosophy of science took that same approach.

The problem is that if one wants to attain truth, one has to follow certain rules. Departing from those rules, one arrives

at a very poor idea of what people in laboratories really do. The other approach is to start with describing what people are actually doing in laboratories, archives and institutes and to try to account for the lofty ideals that, intended or

unintended, emerge from that work. But how does that contribute to knowing the truth or to adding to objective knowledge - the general goals of scientific research? One could claim that research is a collective system of selection. In other words,

emerging ideas only become good ideas when colleagues or peers select them, i.e. cite them in articles or employ them in their

research. That is how scientific ideas circulate and are legitimized. In one way or another, scientists have to advertise what is good about their work. If one takes this angle of looking at research, concentrating on circulation, then anything that does not circulate is not considered

research. If one does not publish one's results, they simply

fall outside the system of research.So, the first condition for contributing to research is

that results need to be published, they need to be part of the system of circulation and citation. The second condition is that any result needs an argument as to what its value is. In the sciences, there is a structure of gate-keepers, of people

who decide whether something should be published or not. In fact, there is a whole social system concerning research in the

scientific world. If that is a broad outline of what research is, it might

be interesting to look at the artistic world and ask under what conditions artists conduct research. Questions would be, then,

how does artwork circulate, how does artwork contribute to a lofty ideal, and is there something like a lofty ideal in the

world of visual art? I believe here one really runs into problems. First of all, for the sciences, from Aristotle up to the present day, there is a certain – albeit problematic – notion of truth guiding the scientific domain. I am not sure

that there is a similar notion available for the arts. In Gombrich's work, there is a tradition of the representation of

nature which points at a similarity between the development of the sciences and the arts. However, it is no coincidence that the Gombrich line of thought, for example in Art and Illusion, ends at the end of the 19th century. As soon as you enter the

20th century, the notion of representation of nature and similar lines of reasoning explode. I doubt that anyone in our current postmodern era could pinpoint a lofty ideal and connect that to visual art as research.

The second problem I see is the organization of the circulation of artworks. My impression is that there is a

different kind of division of labor involved in the sciences than in the artistic world. In the sciences, those who produce are also those who argue about the work. In the artistic world, there is a division between those who produce artworks and those who argue about them, between artists, on the one hand,

and curators and critics on the other. There are some artists

who write about their own work, but these are seldom the most interesting texts. Thus, I am not sure that art would improve

if artists were forced to reason about their work. I do believe that one has to be cautious in disrupting that division of labor, that distinction between the production of art and the reasoning about art. Do postmodern architects, who read and

discuss, for example, Virilio and Deleuze, design the kind of buildings we want to live in?

So, I am a bit skeptical about talking about artistic production as a form of research. In my view, a similarity

between the sciences and visual art would involve a different kind of circulation of artworks. In fact, one has to change the

practice of the artist in order to get that similarity. Last but not least, I am not entirely sure what the urge is to

classify artistic work as research. Why would the Rijksakademie hand out PhD degrees? Is it because of the prestige, is it because of the money? Well, the prestige and the money for the sciences is waning. So, if you want to go for success, go into

sports or show business rather than into sciences. I want to stress once again that the circulation of artworks, the

practice of art, and the relation between production and criticism has to change because of research and PhD degrees in the art world. I am not sure that is a good idea.

Seven ClaimsJames McAllister(This text is a recorded and edited version of the workshop talk)

My remarks are going to be structured around seven claims or

theses and the general conclusion that I am going to present is that I am in favor of the concept of artistic research, but that I am very skeptical about awarding PhD degrees for this research.

1. As a philosopher of science, I am in no way anti-science or

anti-physics as, for example, sociologists of science sometimes portray themselves. I am a great admirer of the sciences, I am

a great admirer of physics. At the same time, I am also properly, in a philosophical way, critical of these practices. Therefore, my first claim is that the sorts of things that are presented as great attainments in the preliminary statement

"Art and Method" are relatively atypical for the natural sciences. The statement mentions "generalization,

repeatability, and quantification." It seems to me that when you fix your image of the sciences on the family of the natural

sciences, you have a view of the natural sciences heavily dominated by physics, in fact, by a particular branch of

physics such as particle physics. The natural sciences as a whole are very diverse. Particle physics is very atypical of

what happens in the natural sciences. So, if we are trying to compare artistic practice with scientific practice and we want to suggest that these two things can be on a par we are making life unnecessarily complicated and difficult for ourselves by

taking a relatively atypical image of the natural sciences. The whole point is that even in the natural sciences, there are

very few practices that approximate particle physics. If you think, for example, even just remaining within the natural sciences, of such areas as evolutionary biology, of some forms of chemistry, or of the engineering sciences, you will find

that notions such as generalization, repeatability, and quantification do not play a very large role. In fact, the whole idea of the mathematical laws of nature, which is behind these notions, is a product of physics. However, many

scientists never produce laws of nature. So, philosophers of science have to maintain a critical and differentiating view of

the natural sciences, before bringing in the other part of the comparison, which should be the artistic production.

2. The preliminary statement suggests further that art differs from the sciences because artists aim at unique, particular,

local knowledge. That is not quite true. I think it is fair to

say that many sciences, like the arts, aim at unique, particular and local knowledge. Many sciences, even natural

sciences, aim not at structural knowledge organized in universal principles or laws of nature, but take a historical view. They regard the development of the universe not as an unfolding of possibilities already embedded in the fundamental

laws of nature, but as a rather contingent succession of events for which it is very difficult to find a pattern. Since these

events cannot be reduced to a simple pattern or law, you have to produce a differentiating description. That would then be a

unique, particular, local knowledge. If you enter these considerations which could come from, for example, engineering

science, where a lot of knowledge is in forms of knowledge of behavior of particular instruments, particular materials, or

structures under very specific conditions, then you see once again that the focus on repeatability, universality, and likeness all fall away. So what I am suggesting with my first two claims is that the sciences and the arts are much more

similar then one might realize.

3. There is a further respect in which the sciences and the arts can be said to be similar. This is the area of aesthetic factors in which I particularly work in my job as a philosopher of science. Aesthetic factors play an important role in the

sciences in both shaping research and in evaluating the results of research. I am thinking of concepts such as mathematical beauty. Aesthetic criteria play an important role alongside logical and empirical criteria in the evaluation of scientific

theories and hypotheses. When scientists apply logical and empirical criteria and point out, for example, that a certain

theory is logically consistent they do that in the form of an argument. When they apply aesthetic criteria, it is often not in the form of an argument, but in the form of a gut feeling, sometimes simply called the aesthetic taste of scientists. This is where I have to differ with my colleague Gerard de Vries who

emphasized the idea that in the sciences the validation of

results is based on arguments. He claimed that a scientist always has to have an argument for accepting or rejecting a

theory. I believe he suggested that that differs from the arts, since in the arts what would count is whether one likes something or not. Leaving aside for a moment the question whether that is a good characterization for what happens in the

arts - there is a lot of argumentation that goes on in the arts - what he says about the validation of scientific theories is

only partly borne out by the historical record if you take aesthetic factors into account. It is very difficult in the

sciences to produce an argument of the kind that Gerard de Vries has in mind for disliking a particular scientific theory

on aesthetic grounds. You could ask yourself, for example, whether the resistance of people like Einstein against quantum

mechanics is really argued. I do not think it is, because the arguments were all pointing the other way. Einstein was well aware of this and saw the validity of the arguments. Still he simply said that he did not like the theory. My third claim

refers again to the similarity between sciences and the arts. Not just because aesthetics plays a part in both of them, but

also because there is a limit to the extent preferences and validation can be argued.

4. My fourth claim is that artworks contain knowledge about the

world. I am not sure to what extent it is necessary to argue for this claim in this distinguished context. If I had to argue for it I would present a historical argument going back to the Renaissance where the distinction between the sciences and the

arts was much more fluid and vague then it is now. I would show illustrations of works that transcend the boundary between what

we now see as the sciences and the arts: illustrations from anatomical works, botanical works, and astronomical works. They are beautiful and striking and from that point of view you could say that they count as works of art, but they also contain detailed knowledge claims. I would continue my

historical argument by pointing to some of the graphic

representation techniques of the 20th century and claim that it is difficult sometimes to draw a boundary between a work of art

and a product of science.I hope to have got across so far the conviction that the

distinction between the sciences and the arts is often not as strict as it might seem. There is much diversity in the

scientific camp, which underlines the claim that there is a lot of communality between the sciences and the arts. One of them

is that art works contain knowledge about the world.

5. That seems to open up for me the possibility of arguing that you can speak of artistic research. How would I embed that

claim, how would I justify it? I would like to take a slightly different approach to the concept of research than my colleague

Gerard de Vries did. I would say that research is possible if a network of validity exists. One thing that I like about Gerard de Vries' approach is his insistence on the network as a property of the sciences. I think those network properties

exist, maybe not exactly in the way De Vries claimed, but I do believe that networks enable research. I also think that these

networks exist in the arts, which De Vries did not stress enough. Obviously, what is crucial in this claim is the question of what I mean with a network of validity. I do not simply mean that results should be published. I think of a

network with different places and different contexts where one can judge the validity of the work which, therefore, legitimizes that work. The different contexts and different places which make up a network are very important. In the

sciences, for example in physics, there is a network of laboratories, in particle physics there is a worldwide network

of accelerators. The validity of the research is judged in these places. Furthermore, there is a sort of metaphysical methodological assumption implying that what holds inside the laboratory also holds outside the laboratory. Complicated rules of procedure and rules of translation apply results established

in the laboratory to the world outside. That is a fundamental

and fascinating area of science studies. Look for instance at how someone like Pasteur was able to produce certain vaccines

in the laboratory under highly clinical and controlled conditions and the way he applied them to farmyards. This is an example of a network of validity. First of all there is a network of laboratories as centers of calculation and

experimentation, but the network transcends the laboratory. The work goes out in the field in what is sometimes called

applications. It seems to me that the same counts for the arts. In the art world, you also have an enormous network of validity

with artists, gallerists, curators, critics, and so on. That is similar to the network of laboratories even with regard to the

clinical conditions of white painted walls. But there is also a way in which you can transcend this network and go out, so to

speak, into the field.

6. My claim of a network of validity suggests that there is a network of decentralized points in which the legitimacy of a

contribution is judged. Then the obvious question is what the criteria are for that judgement. The following will help to

fuse the sciences and the arts more closely together. The criterion of quality in research is always empirical success, but that has to be interpreted broadly enough to fit everything into the tent. So, in the sciences, in physics for example,

empirical success is interpreted very literally: it is the matching of theory with empirical data. Of course, empirical data are always empirical data of a certain kind. For physics and particle physics empirical data are caught in the outcome

of big and complex experiments. The criterion of quality in research in artistic contexts would also imply empirical

success on this view with the same scope for interpretation of that concept. So, the extent of, for example, communication of an artwork would also count as empirical success.

7. I have one more claim. I think artistic research exists. I

do not think, incidentally, that artistic research consists of

writing think-pieces to accompany works of art or exhibitions. Rather, the research exists in the works of art themselves. The

artworks are the things that embody distinctive knowledge about the world. Somebody writing an art historical treatise about art is not doing artistic research. That is scientific research. However, I am very skeptical of the idea that you

have to buy into the PhD system just because artistic research exists and because there are clear criteria for quality in

artistic research. I think there is something wrong about this idea. One has to remember, as Gerard de Vries also hinted, that

the PhD degree is part of a particular academic system, which is a relatively latecomer in, for example, Western Europe.

Degrees like the BA and the MA which the Netherlands are now introducing in the universities are hundreds of years old - and

I can congratulate the Netherlands on catching up - but the PhD degree is a recent invention. The PhD's historical roots are tied up with the demands of the German chemical industry in the 19th century. So, the PhD degree is a manifestation of an

arbitrary system of university organization. I cannot think of any good reason for carrying that over into a school like the

Rijksakademie and into artistic research. If anything, such PhD degree will constrain and put your institute into a straitjacket since you have to accept the terms of duration and the expectations regarding output. Those established subjects

are sufficiently unlike art. Especially when the PhD research has to be embedded in a department of the University of Amsterdam - a school which has not much affinity with the Rijksakademie - you will not only unnecessarily introduce a PhD

program, you will also be harmed since such link would lead to a scholastic and uninteresting academic research experience for

your institute.

Triggers for Awareness(This text is a recorded and edited version of a workshop talk)

Anne-Mie van Kerckhoven

In the beginning of the 1970s, I made exhibitions with intuitive drawings. People wanted to have those drawings explained. That is not the way my brain works, so I did not know what to say about those drawings. Then I started to make

things up as explanations. Fortunately, the drawings and the explanations came from the same brain. At that point of making

art, I was reading about science and philosophy as another way of dealing with the same problems. In the 1980s, when I was an

artist in residence in the Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence, I found out that people there were thinking about

thinking as a field of knowledge representation. At that moment in postmodernism, art was about art and the research in

knowledge representation was about knowledge representation. So, on different levels and in different fields, everyone was dealing with their own problems in their own domain. I think that after postmodernism all these fields shifted their context

again into a new norm.When I think about art institutes and PhD programs in the

21st century, I always wonder what will happen with the freedom to work as an artist. Of course, artists can choose a theoretical program, but I do hope that not every artist will start to be in need of a PhD degree. I know that new programs

are in the process of being evaluated, but I am afraid that, as a result of them, academic forms of art will emerge without any connection to artistic freedom. What struck me in the course of today's workshop is that if one looks at research areas in art

and in the sciences it seems that always a certain amount of violence is involved. So, I think there are three domains of

creativity: art is a creative force, science is a creative force, and violence is a creative force as well. As artists we provide triggers for awareness and new points of view that the world needs to go on. I believe that scientists work with a reality entirely different from ours. For that reason, there is

no scientist or philosopher who can really talk about art and,

similarly, there is no artist who can really talk about science or philosophy.

Hermann Pitz (This text is a recorded and edited version of the workshop talk)

I have been working as a visual artist for more than twenty

years now if I consider the date of the first "publication" of my work as a professional start. For me, it is indeed important

that there is a public. I was struck by James McAllister's talk since it really corresponds to how I feel as an artist in the

art world. Twelve years ago someone who is quite informed about the

museum business wrote about me that I am an artists's artist. And it is true, I have never been on the cover of a magazine for a mainstream audience: my audience consists of artists, there is nobody else involved. But, of course, people can look

at the work if it happens to be in a public place. I am opposed to the idea that there is a separation of labor in the art

world. There are curators who might pick up your work or not, but if they do not pick it up, you still do your work. My first experience with that was my first show in 1978 where I did not have more than 15 visitors.

1. My first statement is: audience and art is any accumulation of two people or more in the public sphere. You will not succeed in building up a body of work as a young artist if you

aim for numbers, if you say that you need at least 1000 visitors at your show. It is interesting that James McAllister

talked about scientists who isolate themselves and communicate from a Platonic island. I believe that as a young artist you will always be in that situation with or without a PhD degree.

2. The second aspect I should mention as a senior adviser of

this institute is that at the Rijksakademie it is quite

remarkable that we do not issue any diploma when students leave the institute. Our diploma is the admission to the institute. A

large part of the teaching activity invested here - some of my colleagues like Luc Tuymans spend fifty percent of their teaching time on the admission procedure - consists of looking at some thousand files. Finally thirty people are selected who

can enter the institute. So, basically the diploma we issue is the credit we give by saying these persons are at a point in

their life where they could add to our artists' project. That is, in fact, also where research comes in. But it is open to

the artists to use the time here as a time of private seclusion or whether they try to employ this public institute for their

career. You will see a lot of our former participants in this year's Venice biennial. The output we want to have is young

artists who find their own way of working in the professional, elitist system or in another new circuit or network of the art world. Of course, the question is whether we need a PhD system while focusing on that aim.

3. I do think that in non-English speaking Europe - not only in

Germany but also in the Netherlands - my artist-colleagues who teach are mostly against PhD-forms of education, because they fear that some sort of school system will be put over us where everyone has to write theses and the professors have to read

and judge them. The question we have is, is that really the core business of what art institutes should do? We tend to say no, that is not our core business. If we have PhD degrees here, we would only offer them to the few people who take the

initiative themselves for getting such a degree. What has not been mentioned yet is the policy of the European community

because of which there will be a PhD norm in the art sector all over Europe in 2009. If we as artists just boycott that, that will be a stupid thing to do, because then Brussels will tell us how to institute those degrees. I think that we as artists teaching today should do as much as possible in developing

these structures ourselves, so that they fit what the art

community needs.

4. There is another point I should add to the discussion. I have taught twice at MIT in Boston in the architecture department. What I did appreciate as a teaching artist in the American system is that people work very hard. When there is a

seminar, for example, everybody is there. This might have to do partly with the costs of the programs in America where people

have to invest much money themselves. I really liked the experience, though, of how people try to get everything out of

a guest teacher. Here the atmosphere is mostly more relaxed and less competitive. There have been many good and important

artists in America in the last 50 years. I do not know how much of that quality is due to the American school system or whether

these artists would emerge anyway in any system.

5. The lofty ideal Gerard de Vries mentioned is something I would not want to do without in the art world. As artists we

have something like an ideal in a very general form. In the context of the modern types of society we live in and the

merchandise we produce, I would call that ideal individuality. It is about how the individual functions in modern society. Our customers, people who come and see our shows, come out of different contexts. On the one hand, we are of course leisure

industry, which means mainly fun. But there are also 600.000 people who go voluntarily to Dokumenta since they want to see things which differ from what they find in their own context. So, I do think that, in our type of society and perhaps even

more so in future ones, there is a need for articulating the individual. That is our market, that is what we sell. Our lofty

ideal is linked to the individual and the position of the individual in modern society.

6. You could say, art is picture making. We create a visual product which is about the eye and the brain. – New brain

research considers the eye as a part of the brain. - We also

have competitors today such as CNN. At the same time we have to admit that artists presently do no longer want to make the sort

of classical images which exist in everyone's consciousness such as Picasso's Guernica. In fact, since Guernica there has not been a singular artwork with a similar impact on civilization. Of course, someone like Osama Bin Laden helps

create those impact images today. Everybody has the image of the collapsing WTC buildings in their minds. We should not even

consider competing with that. We are making pictures or images on an individual basis and those pictures are distributed in

society on an individual level. That has to do with how society has changed and how picture makers have changed. There is

(Hollywood) entertainment, there is infotainment, so we have all kinds of new picture worlds and new kinds of competition

which art production did not have to face in former societies.

7. Sometimes young artists doubt whether what they are doing is worthwhile. My reaction to that is that such doubt is not an

excuse for not making it. Considerations like that work differently for a commercial production. However, when you

start working as an artist on a certain subject, you do not need a specific interest for commercial production. That is not how a legitimation for what you do as an artist works. This is very important, because if we go on with PhD programs as a norm

to give quality to artworks, then we have a problem. If works are threatened to fall out of the norm of the school they will not be produced. Young artists would then tend to erase everything that is not "interesting" in their work. And then

you would limit art production at an early stage in an entirely wrong way.

8. That concurs with what James McAllister said about the communities in art. I think the art world has been, at least for the last 50 years, a tribal world. If an artist deals with a certain gallery or a certain curator, he or she is in a

certain tribe and functions within this tribe. The exponents in

this tribe and their careers also determine the public image of the artist's work. Curators take "their" artists with them to

shows whenever they have the opportunity to show work. Curators will not necessarily step out of their own tribe, because that is a lot of work. They have to start at point zero again and go to shows and really look at work. The latter hardly happens in

the art world: one does not look at work, since the art world is about what artists are saying, about the work in some sort

of reproduction. My personal theory is that artists became enthusiastic about video because that is already reproduction.

So, they even do no longer have to deal with an original, they simply deliver the copy that works in the tribal structure

right away. There is a point where a PhD degree could be interesting

which is connected with my doubt whether it is good for institutes such as the Rijksakademie to be linked to these tribes. In that sense a PhD degree could be an interesting sort of emergency exit for young artists who decide by themselves -

or through their work as it happens to be - to be an artist for artists only i.e. outside of the tribal success system. For

those artists it could be interesting to say "why don't I try to invent a new artistic personality." Those new personalities could indeed be people who reflect on the work they make themselves or what they see in their community. That could be a

new tool for this institute for fostering ideas that could not survive otherwise in the tribal structure of the art world.

DiscussionSelection

Audience: I agree in general terms with what James McAllister said, but I do not understand what an aesthetic view of science is.

McAllister: When you read testimonies of scientists you will

find that they react to theories in more ways than standard philosophy of science accepts. Standard philosophy normally

takes a logical and empirical model of evaluation of theories. According to that model, scientists would have to evaluate the model on logical grounds such as logical consistency. However, scientists attach aesthetic value to properties of theories

that have little to do with logical structure or empirical performance. They will attach aesthetic value to, for example,

metaphysical properties of theories: whether they are consistent with determinism or whether they present a

continuous view of nature. The examples I mentioned in my talk are indeed examples of that line of thought. Einstein's

resistance against the indeterminism of quantum theory was an expression of aesthetic dislike, not an expression of doubt for

the theory's ability to come up with good predictions. Aesthetic dislike entails that the theory simply is not elegant. Sometimes this is linked with the Renaissance idea of unity of the virtues where anything that is true must also be

beautiful. The notion of beauty plays a small role in present art

theory. It plays a slightly bigger role in scientific theory. Scientists are more ready to call a theory beautiful and mean something good then art critics to call an artwork beautiful and mean something good. Thus, beauty has a bigger profile as a

concept among present day scientists than among present day art critics. But what do scientists mean by beauty? Often they mean the same things as art critics do in praising, for example, a painting: a certain form of coordination, simplicity, symmetry,

or more generally a certain form of harmony. Many physicists think that the Maxwell equations are beautiful since they

present exceptional symmetry in a series of four equations. I do not want to throw a too tied net about those concepts, though, and then find out that the next scientific revolution shifts all of them again. However, I think it is fair to say that the complexity of aesthetic discourse amongst physicists

is less sophisticated than that amongst art critics. Scientists

are, in fact, not trained in this vocabulary whereas art critics are. So, you have to make some degree of allowance for

a slightly schematic, superficial, naive view. If you hear physicists talk, they will often talk about beauty and elegance in regard to their theory. The underlying message is that scientists are not only seeking truth, but aesthetic value as

well. They label that aesthetic value as beauty, because that is what they think it is.

AVK: Could that have to do with the structure of the brain

itself in the sense that if something is felt as beautiful in the brain it must be related to truth?

JMA: I do not think that we are programmed to find particular

things beautiful. If you look at the history of science, from 1600 to 2000, then you will see that standards of beauty change. That goes faster than evolutionary changes, so those standards are learned and socialized.

AWB: You mentioned in the context of point three, the aesthetic

factors, the notion of the gut feeling. I have the inclination to compare that with what we in the field of aesthetics call, in line with Arthur Danto, the trained gaze of the art world. For example during the Rijksakademie's Open Atelier days, you

always find works interesting which turn out to be the favorite works of other visitors as well. I assume that is similar to how physicists agree to call a mathematical equation beautiful or elegant. I have a tendency to connect the gut feeling or the

trained gaze with what you called somewhat in passing the network of accelerators. I am not quite sure though whether I

understood your notion of network accelerators in the right way. So, could you elaborate on that notion?

JMA: Let me first add something to your first point. In physics, people within the same generation or within a similar

scientific development normally agree on which theories are

beautiful, but there is variation in time. By the way, it had not occurred to me that the aesthetic aspect of science would

be a controversial point in this workshop. People who want to read more about that aesthetic aspect, should read my book Beauty and Revolution in Science which contains a lot of case studies.

The network of accelerators is a special case of what I call the network of validity. In particle physics, there is a

relatively small number of accelerators - experimental machines in Geneva and California and so on - which are machines for

generating data. Any result established or claimed in one of these centers can only be replicated or legitimized in one of

the other centers. So, these accelerators form in a very literal sense a network of machines. They form a pure world,

almost a Platonic world, sheltered from the real world, because there are only a few of these particle accelerators, and the output they produce is not of daily relevance. So, the question in philosophy of science is what is the relationship between

the results established within the walls of these accelerators, within the network, and the world outside? Physicists have a

complicated, ultimately sensible, but nonetheless metaphysical and very particular account for explaining how the results can be applied to the universe as a whole. I like to think there is something similar to that in art. There is a network of

material transfer consisting of artists, dealers, gallerists, curators, and critics, but there is also something about art that does not only exist in the network, but applies to the rest of the world as well. My main point is, that I would like

to link the notion of research to the existence of the network of validity. So unlike my colleague Gerard de Vries, I believe

that validity has not so much to do with publications as with the existence of this network. So if you can show that the network exists, then you have research. You have that in science, you have that in art.

HS: How do you link the network of validity to the notion of

empirical success?

JMA: In a way, we have no choice but to say that the criterion of validity is empirical success. The link I make is that empirical success is tested and validated in the network. You often find that most of our precious human creations are not

immediately ready for the outside world. They have to remain, at least for the first instance, in protected environments.

That holds for scientific results and scientific theories which can only be verified in the special setting of a laboratory and

for artworks which have their own requirements. So, the empirical success can only be judged initially within the

network, within the structure of the protected environments, and once it has been validated there, it can be exported to the

outside world. Look at, for example, the pharmaceutical industry and a new vaccine. You first test it and once it has proved its case and has been made more stable and resistant, it is taken out of the laboratory. I think that happens similarly

in art. Most artworks, at least in the first instance, simply cannot survive in the outside world. They need a special space

provided by the art world network.

AVK: Gerard de Vries mentioned that research needs circulation otherwise it would not be research. I think that is a false

statement. Shouldn't you have related that circulation to the results of research? Research itself seems to be a different thing.

GdV: In order to enter into the system of research, I think that you have to publish. So anything that is preparatory work

for that - which may take on a lot of forms such as thinking, reasoning, reading books, experimenting and so on - remains a private affair as long as it is not public. I try to shift the word research from individual work to collective work. I could agree with you if you say, we artists are doing research in the

sense a journalist is doing research. Then research is a very

broad term for thinking, investigating, and so on. But if you want to draw similarities with the sciences, research is a

different kind of subject. In the sciences, research is connected to justification and to the system which justifies results. As long as your work is not justified by your colleagues, it maybe very interesting what you are doing, but

you are not contributing to the business of science. So, there is a difference between how artists and how

scientists understand their own work. In the arts, at least in the last century, the artist considers him or herself a person

who produces experiences and employs experiences. In the sciences, scientists understand themselves as a part of a

collective business. There is no such thing as an individual scientist. You cannot do science on your own. The self-

understanding of artists is connected to an idiosyncratic experience they want to spread and show. That attitude is different from the attitude of scientists who know they are a small part in an enormous machine producing a lofty ideal

called truth.

AWB: I do see similarities between the topical art world and the scientific world in your notions of recognition, selection and "publication." In today's art world, someone who is somewhere in an attic producing paintings nobody will ever see

is not considered an artist in the strict sense, not according to how the international art community works. In other words, just as a scientist, an artist needs justification and recognition from fellow artists, curators, critics and

"publish" his or her work in shows, in large international exhibitions. Perhaps you are partly right in saying that

different from the scientific world, there is some division of labor in the art world since curators - and to a certain extent critics - play a role in the selection and recognition of work. However, particularly curators often have an art school background. At the same time, there is another connection

between the scientific world and the art world. It seems to me

that you passed the realm of creativity, the spark about which scientists talk when, for example, they see at once a solution

in a mathematical equation and artists in discovering a solution for a problem in their work. Of course, artists are the pre-eminent creative minds. So, I do think that notions of selection, recognition, and creativity are somehow similar in

the world of science and the art world.

GdV: Still, when you want to hand out PhD degrees in the art world you will have a problem. An interesting example to

clarify this is the field of engineering. At the Technical University in Delft you can get a PhD degree for a construction

plus an argument for why this construction is the way it is. You cannot say, I have a machine and it works, so give me the

PhD degree. You have to argue about it. If you follow this model, if you need an argument for an artwork, that will affect the artistic practice. I do think that the art world is changing in the sense that the romantic idea of the solitary

artist is obsolete. Nevertheless I remain opposed to artistic Phd degrees for reasons I gave earlier.

AWB: Well, artists are not wordless creatures. Just like your Delft engineers, they could argue why the constructed work is the way it is. In that sense, the artwork is a contracted

argument.

HS: I would like to point out something to Gerard de Vries. You should realize that not every artist has to produce a PhD

degree. However, it is important today that the specificity of knowledge that artists produce becomes emancipated as happened

some hundred years ago in your example of the technical university. Emancipation means that a discourse will be established: it will become clear that there is a possibility and a necessity to discuss the produced work. But perhaps only a few people will ultimately realize a PhD degree. That degree

is not the most important thing. What is important is the

establishment and recognition of artistic research.