ABSTRACT
The requirement to produce a body of artwork in relation to a programme of research has somehow resulted in the creation of works which, in having to respond not just to artistic initiatives but also to cognitive or epistemic demands, are judged to be lesser works of art. The value of Kant's and Adorno's theories for artistic research, and for the concern over the loss of autonomy, is that they formulate art's autonomy as a matter of its engagement with already-active ways of knowing and its capacity to affect those ways of knowing. The issue here is what the artist-researcher chooses to allow into the artistic research process, and what they decide to exclude on the grounds that it is not part of the art. The key points here are the meaning of 'concept', and the place of concepts in the production of artistic research.
