This paper examines the positioning of art practice as a mode of research through various legitimising practices. While frequently fruitful, the imperative to make art justify itself as a form of research in order to achieve legitimacy allows that in art which does not engage in negative dialectics to slip from view. The possibility of the kind of rigorous thinking that is called for in art-as-research is a manner of recognition not based on established methods, a recognition that offers little in the way of certifiable knowledge. What art-as-research can give, however, is a manner of thinking and doing that finds legitimacy in strict fidelity to the specific contours of the work. The question is not whether or how artists can justify this as research, but whether the university is prepared to recognise research not grounded in established methodological practices, but rather in the abyss of its own groundless affirmation.