Profaning as Artful Inquiry: Fuck Around and Find Out . . . the Seductive Lure Into the Sublime

This paper unsettles the easy optimism and moral aesthetics that can domesticate arts-based research into consumable, uplifting products. Drawing on profane methodologies and artists who have jolted us, we embrace irreverence, obscenity, and the “fuck it” aesthetic—not as nihilism, but as a method to question what is obscured when inquiry is aestheticized as moral good, empowerment, or evocative transformation. We argue that arts-based research risks becoming methodological word-art—superficially disruptive yet institutionally safe—where beauty substitutes for ethics and aesthetic cues replace accountability. Profaning becomes a methodological stance that refuses tidy resolution, resists redemptive outputs, and remains with mess, failure, and unresolved tensions. Profaning artful inquiry is an ethic of discomfort, an invitation to fuck around and find out what research might be when stripped of redemptive sheen.