People lament the 'deskilling' of art practices. I, too, am among them but not wholeheartedly. I'm a little confused by my own unwillingness to scream and shout that artists, across the arts, are becoming so 'dumbed-down' in skills. At the recent art expo in Chicago, a big bid to be an international art fair as it once was, people did remark on the show's high quality. I don't know what they meant by that, whether it was the art star exhibitors, the cutting-edge content or styles, or the skills in execution displayed. I will say that technical skill at a very high level was much in evidence, especially in painting. Maybe it takes one to know one but I do know when paint handling in all its variants is well done. I saw it at that expo. On the other hand where does skill itself rank in art? For quite a long time, since the beginning of modernism in the early 19C, skill is ranked last. First is originality and when the new appears it is clumsy, unresolved, tentative, confused, uncertain. This is true not only on the arts but across the humanities and in the sciences, too. A French idea (I can't recall whose right now) asserted that first and most desirable is original art and it is extremely rare; second is derivative art, and it is generally what we recognize as the work of the 'best artists'. They develop the ideas of the originals. Then, last, there is redundant art, the art that copies and refines to perfection the ideas and methods of the derivative artists. That means that the most redundant artists are also the most skilled because skill requires a model to match and exceed. Getting back to the expo, with its strong displays of high skill, presented in presumptive 'innovative' form, prompts me to wonder if I was not in the midst of redundant art -- where redundancy was masked by seemingly 'advanced' ideas. Maybe big money does indeed rule the evolution of art. When big money claims it goes to 'advanced original art' is it really just doing what it always did, go to the most skillful redundant art? wc
