share-handbook-for-artistic-research-education-high-definition

5. A. The Basic Questions: ‘Why artistic research?’ and ‘Why the doctorate?’ 1455. A. 4. ‘Notes from a Debate in Ljubljana’ (Bojan Gorenec and Alen Ožbolt)the field is dominated by ‘the political situation’; it is as if politicswishes to see the public university brought to its knees, to see itdestroyed, so that the ‘useful’ parts of it can be privatised.Several years ago, the Resolution of the Parliamentary Committee onCulture explicitly supported ‘the development and proactive fundingof the study of art’ while also promoting collaborations between theMinistry of Culture and the Ministry of Higher Education, Scienceand Technology for the sake of ‘creating the best possible conditionsand possibilities in the field of the study of art’. Because of fundingcutbacks, however, today even our ‘basic mission’ – maintainingthe existing programmes at the existing level of execution – is madeextremely difficult and, as a result, the development and implementationof the third cycle of the PhD in the field of art becomes technicallyand financially impossible.Unfortunately, at present, no one sees any possibility of the statesupporting the implementation of new third-cycle programmes ofstudy in the field of art. At the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, inthe past three to four years, we have prepared an extensive contentfocusedand comparative study in relation to the introduction andmaintenance of the third-cycle curriculum. But, this has not yeteven begun the approval process. Consequently, the PhD in the fieldof art is still ‘under construction’. As we are a part of the Universityof Ljubljana, this is the level at which we are obliged to organise,promote and implement the programme.ConclusionThese different positions, and their animating experiences, evidence the manyregisters at which the question of artistic research education plays out. Theserange from the broad ideological field within which public institutions currentlyoperate (variously signalled by such terms as ‘the market’, ‘privatisation’, ‘publicgood’ and ‘neoliberalism’) to the micro-politics of individual institutions andprofessional associations. One of the characteristics of this contestation is theway in which these registers can either be held in isolation from each other orentangle and even collapse into each other under the weight of a particularanalysis. There is also clearly a tension between the rhetorical formulation ofadvocacy and that of contestation. In some instances, it appears that the simpleacknowledgement that artistic research education is contested is already to forfeitlegitimacy. In other cases, the fact that artistic research education is an enterprisecharacterised by dissensus and interwoven with fundamental questions oflegitimacy, saliency and value is seen to be a virtue. It seems highly significantthat the North American settlement on the MFA has begun to be reviewed,however tentatively. The next section will assess how this contestation continuesto play out at the level of definition.