Don’t expect art to provide solutions to societal issues or to be economically profitable. Professor Janneke Wesseling states that art can only flourish when it is free from demands of profit or concrete results.
Like science, art can be a high-value form of research. Similar to the scientific process, the artistic process sometimes is a struggle that leads to surprising and unexpected results, providing new insights into the world we live in.
Contemporary society wrongly expects art to provide solutions to societal issues and to be economically profitable. This is a trend that closely resembles the contemporary societal attitude towards science. Janneke Wesseling explains that art can only flourish when it is free from demands of profit and of concrete results or solutions. Like fundamental science, fundamental art is essential for creating the unexpected and for gaining deeper insights into reality.
Prof.dr. Janneke Wesseling is director of PhDArts at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts at Leiden University, where she holds the chair in Practice and Theory of Research in the Visual Arts. She is professor in Art and Research at the University of the Arts, The Hague. Janneke Wesseling also writes as an art critic for the daily Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
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