I comment upon the recent blossoming of writing on art, knowledge and research and connect this to its material roots in the changing nature of higher education. I find much of this writing wanting in that it implies a division of art into ‘knowledge-producing’ and ‘non knowledge-producing’ art. I examine how art objects might be said to generate knowledge, particularly the kind of propositional knowledge which sits at the centre of both traditional epistemology and ‘knowledge transfer’ in the contemporary academy. Although there are many ways in which artworks might variously generate such knowledge, I conclude that there is none that is common to all. I go on to examine other kinds of knowledge, particularly Gilbert Ryle's ‘knowledge-how’ and use this as a staging post to suggest that there is yet another kind of knowledge, produced by all works of art. Finally I borrow some ideas from recent work in the philosophy of science to suggest a concrete mechanism by which this knowledge is made available to us.