Over the past two decades, research has played an increasingly present role in the production and exhibition of contemporary art. Given the open-ended remit of art, artists are called upon to provide new insight into often overlooked or intractable issues in ways often implausible for scholars, activists, journalists, and others. Slavs and Tatars have shown a keen grasp of polemical issues in society, clearing new paths for contemporary discourse via a wholly idiosyncratic form of knowledge production: including popular culture, spiritual and esoteric traditions, oral histories, modern myths, as well as scholarly research. The course The Artist as Wise Fool examines various strategies of knowing and un-knowing, of wisdom and idiocy, which are crucial to creating relevant works in an age where information and its dark matter–disinformation–occupy equal spaces in the public imagination.
