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| https://platypus1917.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/robertsjohn_artafterdeskilling2010.pdf |
The absence of would-be palpable skills in contemporary and modern art has become a commonplace of both conservative and radical art-criticism. Indeed these criticisms have tended to define where the critic stands in relation to the critique of authorship and the limits of ‘expression’ at the center of the modernist experience.
The idea that there is an absence of discernable skill in contemporary art is something of a commonplace.
Paper is saying that artists (like Manet) were stuck with a choice. They could produce “ugly” (when compared to prevailing tastes) and define their interests in opposition to the academy and the salon - and a social role as a critic of bourgeois culture. Artists were faced with a crucial choice: to continue to throw their lot in with the official culture and traditional forms of patronage, or work independently in alliance with the emergent private market for art.
A reversal of judgement takes place: rather than the spectator adjudicating a work on the grounds for how well it matches or surpasses inherited technique, the assessment of value is based on how well the work, in its creation of new forms, withdraws from, and adulterates inherited technique.
Paintings can be made of alien, non-painterly, non-artistic things, and consequently can be made with very little labor. Or, rather, painting can easily incorporate nonpainterly things without failing as paintings, or as autonomous aesthetic objects.
Duchamp: the artist is no longer bound to the expressive demands of covering a given surface or modelling a given material, but, rather, to the intellectual demands of re-contextualising extant objects in order to change their sign-value.
As a result, the artist is no longer beholden to actually physically produce her work at all; indeed, in moving from the artisanal to the machino-technical, the artist is able to devolve the work to others, perhaps submitting plans or ideas to specialist technicians for them to execute, or working in collaboration with other artists and technicians as part of an extended division of labor.
The artist may chose to be a master of a given technical process - the manipulation of digital photographs, for instance, or weaving - but this does not determine our judgement of the artist’s skill overall.