Sally-Jane Norman

Justification, because an academy sited outside formal higher education structures might be able to tackle the following key concerns: - Much artistic research is being appropriated and subsumed by universities exclusively bent on expanding their portfolios, their competitive edge, and their profits. - Institutionalisation often represses the art it houses, cloaking it in the polite rhetoric of ‘critical commentaries’, and removing the barb of its unmanageably subversive elements. - Much university research remains inaccessible for wider communities, despite both genuine and token attempts to strengthen its public relevance and dissemination. Provocation, because effective action means getting beyond issues confronted by educational, cultural, industrial, and military academies for more than two millenaries: - Reference bodies, even or especially for evolving cross-sector practices, run the risk of becoming over-codified and over-territorialised by actual or would-be stakeholders. - Academies promoting alternative, non-institutional voices and agency are built on tensions that are as exhausting as they are productive. - Experimental, transdisciplinary intersections for sharing and building artistic knowledge cannot be fixed.