Deskilling

In art history, “deskilling” is a term used to point to the repudiation of artisanal skill in avant-garde works of art. Marcel Duchamp’s “unassisted readymade” is often identified as the origin of this tendency because it is the earliest rejection of painting. It seems overly simplistic, however, to make rejection of painting into the sine qua non of deskilling, because avant-garde painters themselves questioned norms of painterly skill from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, ever more emphatically, before Duchamp created Bottle rack in 1914. Arguably, the origins of the repudiation of skill in art might be traced as far back as the eighteenth century. It was then that the idea of genius came to be defined as freedom from the rule-governed activities that artisans were believed to specialize in (Beech; Shiner). Setting the problem of origins aside though, it is the legacy of the readymade that has contributed most to contemporary art, where any concept, artifact, or activity, given the right institutional setting, might be designated an artwork. In this perplexing “post-medium” situation, the artist is, as theorist Marina Vishmidt puts it, a “non-specialized specialist”, responsible for conceiving a work, sometimes for coordinating skilled makers to realize it, but not for making anything by hand (226). The most striking feature of deskilling, then, is that this tendency links medium-based Modernism to post-medium contemporary art. Skepticism about the place of skill in art endures, whereas other modernist preoccupations—such as medium-specificity, flatness, and progress—have fallen out of favor. Originating as a practical critique of skills associated with representational painting, deskilling ultimately detaches the artist from specialized techniques of any kind.