(2:30)

     James Elkins (SAIC): “The Doctorate as (surrealist) Readymade?  The universities should not worry too much.  Even though it was Duchamp, the founding father of conceptual tendencies in art, who launched the whole process of innovation, there will be no ready-made doctorate.  The criteria that are currently used in the countries that have introduced a PhD in the arts offer all the necessary guarantees to counter such a scenario (or nightmare in the view of certain administrators).”  (p.103)

     “My own uncertainty about the concepts or strategies that might replace research and new knowledge is a reflection of how tricky this subject is.  Universities have not been set up to think about the confluence of making and studying, understanding and knowledge, practice-led research and research-led practice, writing and seeing.”  (p.130)

     “It is superficial, I think, to imagine that art practice can be added to an eclectic selection of disciplines composed by the candidate.  There are academic pursuits that result from combinations such as anthropology+sociology+linguistics, or art history+archaeology+semiotics, but there is no academic practice that combines creative work with any other discipline.”  (p.157)

     “But I haven’t seen examples in which the scholarship melts into creative work, or asks to be read as creative work instead of research.”  (p.159)

     “It seems that the problem of evaluating a creative-art PhD simply cannot be solved unless disciplines give up their shapes and readers step outside their normal interpretive habits: exactly what might make the new degree so interesting, and at the same time ensure it cannot be commensurate with other degrees.”  (p.163)

                           From:  Artists with PhD’s    2009

     ....I think Elkins is right.  Indeed, over the last eight years I found no graduate program worthy enough to add its initials behind my name.  There will be no legitimized PhD in my future, regardless of how far I look.  But no worries, I did the course work, confirmed my candidacy, conducted original research and wrote the dissertation... all inside this most insular, egotistical and logocentric world where, of course, I continue to know more about media production practice and its theory than any of my teachers and supervisors.  (Peer review?)  And so, what else could I do?  I recused myself from the entire rancid PhD process, and flushed its pretension back where it belongs -- down the toilet.  ‘How can these smart people be so dumb?’

     Critical media ethnography is about doing, not accolade, right?  And so, I now prefer the nobler moniker: “Doctor Jazz”.

     “In texts based on the metaphors of montage, quilt making, and jazz improvisation, many things are going on at the same time -- different voices, different perspectives, points of view, angles of vision.  Like autoethnographic performance texts, works that use montage simultaneously create and enact moral meaning.  They move from the personal to the political, from the local to the historical and cultural.  These are dialogical texts.  They presume an active audience.  They create spaces for give-and-take between reader and writer.  They do more than turn the Other into the object of the social science gaze.”

            From Norman Denzin:  Strategies of Qualitative Inquiry    (2003 p.7)