Debating Artistic Research

The year 2020 saw the return of heated and important debate on artistic research. Publication and exhibition documentation from Bogdan Szyber's dismissed doctoral project is accessible online. Please visit https://uniarts.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1424392&dswid=-5871. 

Bogdan Szyber's abstract tells us that "Fauxthentication - Art, Academia, Authorship (or the site-specifics of the Academic Artist) investigates the means of production of the art that can be created within the boundaries of artistic research. It explores the factors that constitute its value system, who or what can produce these signs of value, and for what reasons. The project examines the conditions that expose the flaws of the increasingly standardised higher education industry, which artistic research today is a part of, through the use of institutional critique, critical interventions and site-specific case studies. In a series of performative stagings, Fauxthentication probes the pressures inherent to academic excellence, leading to the grey economy of the higher education industry, that supports and capitalizes on academic fraud, all performed by a global digital proletariat. Artistic research is habitually linked to an academised and thus bureaucratised art practice. This project draws critical attention to the risk of it creating its own branch of artistic research art, or "edu-art", as well as its own category of artistic research theory; thus prone to becoming self-referential and codified, coagulating into a new 'ism' for the initiated. 'Edu-art-ism' grapples with artistic quality assessment, systematically addressing solely the theoretical framing of the work. The Fauxthentication project acknowledges the complexity of the conditions of artistic research by proposing, through its series of explorative stagings, a challenging new way of viewing and hence transforming the very field that it is a part of." 

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