Having last week begun a PhD in Fine Art Practice, I find myself in the position of considering not only what to research but also the nature of research itself.
The idea of art as a research method seems at first relatively novel compared to many other disciplines, but I guess that also depends on how limited a definition of an artwork one uses. I don’t really know anything about Leonardo da Vinci, but he seems to have done plenty of research. In any case, most of this is quite distinct from researching art, which often falls into history of art or more widely some kind of visual studies.
The idea of research being artistic can be both with reference to the means of the research (i.e. drawing rather than taking notes) and the end product (i.e. not simply having a written article). There is no doubt a difficulty here for such activity would not seem comparable with other types of academic research. Here we come up against the idea of research being measurable, either in a quantifiable way or simply compared to other examples. I think this is problematic across academia, particularly with regard to the ideas of ‘quality’ and ‘originality’.
