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Art After Deskilling

Brief Description

This essay extends some of the arguments Roberts makes in his influential book The Intangibilities of Form (Verso, 2007). Here he focuses more directly on the historical conditions that have produced, what he calls, art’s fundamental dialectic of skill-deskilling-reskilling in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Research Rationale

The absence of would-be palpable skills in contemporary and modern art has become a commonplace. Indeed, these criticisms have tended to define where the critic stands in relation to the critique of authorship. In this article, however, Roberts is less interested in why these criticisms take the form they do - this is a matter for ideology-critique and the sociology of criticism and audiences - than in the analysis of the radical transformation of conceptions in artistic skill in the modern period. This necessitates a focus on modernism and the avant-garde, and their alignment with, and retreat from, the modern forces of production and means of reproduction.

Strategies Undertaken

The article, focuses, therefore, on what has been little discussed in art-history and art-criticism, certainly since Adorno – art’s place within the labour-theory of culture: in what ways do artists labour, and how are these forms of labour indexed to art's relationship to the development of general social technique (the advanced level of technology and science as it is expressed in the technical conditions of social reproducibility)? Versions of this essay have been presented, at the University of Aarhus (2009), MICA, Baltimore (2009) and at the University of Vienna (2010) as part of the workshop on labour and art, ‘Warheit Ist Arbeit’; and the essay has been translated into Russian in the Moscow Art Magazine, Summer 2013. The significance of Roberts’s ideas on skill-deskilling-reskilling have been discussed in ‘The Editorial Introduction’ The Journal of Modern Craft, Vol 5, Number 2, 2012.