The term ‘knowledge society’ is used to refer to the increasing relevance of nonmanual knowledge-producing labour in current post-industrial economies.
Contemporary art, especially since 1989, has not been left out of this trend, to the extent that today it is not rare to see artists and curators described as knowledge producers and exhibitions and art works as instances of knowledge production. Acts of Research: Knowledge Production in Contemporary Arts between Knowledge Economy and Critical Practices analyses this development.
The academic discussion of knowledge production in the arts has taken place
mostly in seminars and articles, in which knowledge is often discussed as an intrinsic quality of the artwork. Acts of Research, however, is devoted to studying the rise of knowledge production in contemporary art from the perspective of artistic, curatorial and educational research with an awareness of larger political, economic, geographical and art-related aspects. The concept of ‘acts of research’ is suggested as a way to understand knowledge production as a creative act in which research carried out in relation to a specific material challenges and resists the protocols of conventional knowledge production and norms. It is argued that knowledge production is not a stable concept, but may indicate a series of acts of research that allow each art practice to participate in a collective constitution of both the term and its practice.