In 2006, Henk Slager initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN) together with Jan Kaila and Gertrud Sandqvist, aimed at investigating the consequences of artistic research for current art education in symposia, expert meetings, and presentations.

In The Pleasure of Research, Henk Slager treats these activities and projects as points of inspiration, and shows how the discussion on artistic research has affected the current state of art and education.

He concludes that today’s debate on art education and artistic research echoes the semiotics debate in the 1970s. Therefore, a reconsideration of artistic research is currently required. In Henk Slager’s view that requires a stance where artistic research is considered a “gaya scienza”: a temporary autonomous activity focusing on the intellectual pleasure of an experimental method and an implicated form of artistic thought.