Rethinking tourism scholarship beyond disciplinary convention

We use artistic metaphors to simplify the varying disciplinary methods used by tourism scholars. Through the art perspective, we illustrate how and why the majority of current tourism epistemology is based on a 'painters' perspective, a preliminal approach focused on a disciplinary, structuralist approach. This represents a reactive stance to university and publishing expectations, where change, in the form of multi or post disciplinary thinking, as represented by an artist, is not always readily accepted. We note a small number of tourism scholars could be characterized as 'artisans, for while they recognize the value of art in a post disciplinary mode, they are not artists in their own right. The true artist, the one whose thinking totally disrupts that established by previous generations, has still to emerge.