The ninth Clark Art Institute spring conference was organized by Marq Smith, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Visual Culture, along with Michael Ann Holly and Mark Ledbury, director and associate director, respectively, of the Clark’s Research and Academic Programs. In her opening remarks, Holly noted that a handful of those initially invited to speak declined on the grounds that research was simply what they did and there was really nothing much more they could imagine saying about it. Something of this sense is reflected as well in remarks by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai cited by both Smith and Holly: Appadurai notes in particular that research “has the inevitability of the obvious” and that “it is especially hard to use research to understand research.”1 While this does not seem to me entirely right—Appadurai himself goes on to note the possibility of writing a history of the “huge transformation of our fundamental protocols about the production of reliable new knowledge” before continuing with his argument—it does, I think, usefully indicate how far the conference was inevitably an effort to figure out what it might be to ask a question of “research” and how to ask such a question in ways specific to...