The stereotype of the lonely scholar working monk-like in a corner of the library can be put aside. Most academics now work with computers, accessing journals, writing or revising manuscripts and emailing papers and comments back and forth. The world has become much more interactive and this has changed the nature of academic research, including authorship. In many academic disciplines, collaboration has become the norm in recent decades: in many physical and social sciences, sole authorship of research papers is now unusual. For example, in the American Economic Review, a leading economics journal, coauthorship went from less than 20% in 1958 to 75% in 2008. Percentages are even higher in the physical sciences. And the frequency of citation of coauthored scientific research also tends to be greater: thus Blaise Cronin recently wrote that "bluntly stated, teams trump soloists when it comes to scientific output and impact." But coauthorship in many arts remains rare. Recent scholarship on collaborative science has clarified its advantages and disadvantages (strengths and weaknesses). Combining this analysis with recent trends in advanced art, we predict that collaboration in visual art will become increasingly common in the near future.
But collaborations do not succeed in many situations. A critical condition for their success is the existence of a shared body of knowledge and techniques, which Nielsen calls a shared praxis. A shared praxis does not exist when there is disagreement over basic values. Such disagreements destroy collaborations, for arguments cannot be settled. Arguments can be resolved only if there is general agreement on standards for what it means for analyses or procedures to be valid or correct.
Modern science offers myriad instances of the value of collaboration. A telling example involved Albert Einstein. Einstein was an outspoken opponent of the formal organization of science, and a defender of the solitary scholar: "Only a free individual can make a discovery...Can you imagine an organization of scientists making the discoveries of Charles Darwin?" Einstein's brilliant early work, including his special theory of relativity, was done in almost complete professional isolation. Late in his life, he recalled that "I lived in solitude in the country and noticed how the monotony of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind." Yet in 1912, when Einstein was searching for a mathematical approach to general relativity, it was a friend, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann, who told him that the appropriate tool was Riemannian geometry, and the two coauthored a paper that used this to make progress toward the general theory.
Within the sciences and social sciences, collaboration is usually episodic or short lived, though there are exceptions. It is hard for collaborators to work together over very long periods of time unless some other factor such as a family relationship ties them together. Collaboration requires not only the shared praxis, but also agreement upon the subject to be explored and the strategy to be pursued. Consequently, collaborative work tends to focus on a few articles or a book rather than a lifetime agenda. Because experimental work often has a longer gestation, there may be less collaboration among experimental innovators than among conceptual innovators.
Comparison of collaboration in the sciences and in the visual arts reveals some important differences. Though collaboration is less common in the visual arts and humanities in general, the collaboration that does take place in the arts is more enduring, often life-long and inclusive of all the artistic work of collaborators. In contrast, scientific collaboration, beyond long-term employment in the same lab, is usually confined to a single project that may produce a few articles or a book. Then collaborators move on to other work and, often, other collaborators. A productive scientist who is prone to collaboration may have dozens of collaborators over a lifetime. The explanation of this difference between collaboration in the sciences and the arts may be found in the difference in what is shared in the shared praxis. In the sciences, co-authors share methods, subject interests and a basic conceptual or experimental approach. Shared praxis in the visual arts must go much deeper to include shared personal tastes, artistic values and style of expression that are a fundamental part of the artists' identities. The need for these deeper shared characteristics explains why there are fewer collaborations, that the collaborations that do exist are longer lasting, and often combined with a personal partnership. If artistic identities are rather completely shared, then joint artistic output is much easier.
To be continued: our next (joint) post will examine the history of artistic collaboration.