8.1.5Analyzing and evaluating artistic research

Unlike academic research, the registration and evaluation of the outcomes of artistic research is not harmonized across the Flemish higher education space. Even though every association requires doctoral candidates in the arts to register and store their publication output in institutional repositories for inclusion in the BOF-key, there are considerable variations in the instruments used to monitor arts and design research outcomes that diverge from traditional academic formats, such as peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers. Because information about the outcomes of artistic research is stored in differently organized repositories and its registration does not currently follow uniform entry protocols in different institutions, few observations can be conclusively made about the material outcomes of eighteen years of research in the arts in Flanders. Given the varieties in the status of written dissertations as a prerequisite for obtaining a doctoral title across the various Flemish university associations, even the PhD thesis does not represent a disambiguated object to systematically address the results of artistic research beyond analyses of broad metadata categories.

As a result, the funding scheme for artistic research currently does not include a variable ex-post component intended to allocate resources based on performance indicators. And, insofar as variable funding allocation is practiced in contexts other than Flanders, it is mostly operationalized in qualitative assessment instruments like the UK’s REF (Research Excellence Framework), Australia’s ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia), and the Swedish Research Council’s periodic evaluation of support for artistic research by expert committees. Even though there is little consensus as to how excellence and quality can be adequately assessed when it comes to artistic research, the parties involved in most higher education contexts agree that it makes little sense to simply integrate arts and design research outcomes into existing bibliometric monitoring tools and assessment instruments. In this respect, Poland stands out as a solitary counterexample: there, the CESU (Comprehensive Evaluation of Scientific Units) includes quantitative indications of artistic researchers’ performance using weighted outcome measures, which have been implemented in the same PRFS (Performance-Based Research Funding System) that is used to assess traditional academic outcomes. But the fact that such time- and labour-intensive outcomes of artistic research as a symphony or screenplay are valued below scholarly publications in scientific journals with average impact factors demonstrates that it is difficult, and maybe even undesirable, to liken arts and design research outcomes to scholarly realisations in an integrated assessment tool.

While it is true that there are very few advocates for the application of quantitative and metric logics to artistic research, the field would certainly benefit from systematic registration. Currently, the lack of tools to structurally document and disclose the outcomes of artistic research, combined with the ephemeral nature of at least some of its possible realisations, such as performances and punctual exhibitions, obscure the results of research in the arts, and render the accomplishments of individual researchers, and of the institutions they are embedded in, discreet at best. Future steps in the institutionalization of artistic research in Flanders must therefore recognize the inappropriateness of metric approaches for the assessment of artistic research, while also emphasizing the need to disclose artistic research outcomes and the investigative trajectories they are situated in so as to benefit the field’s future.