
Is De-Skilling Killing Arts Education? - luu
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/f-scott-hess/is-deskilling-killing-you_b_5631214.html
======
manachar
I know an artist. My favorite statement he repeated was, "It isn't art until
it's sold, until then it's a storage problem".

Highbrow modern art has a very very very tiny niche market of people who
mainly invest in art of large sums of money for complex and personal reasons
that normally boil down to looking for the next Pollock, Warhol, etc. There's
an entire ecosystem of galleries, showings, parties, and auction houses
devoted to these highly wealthy patrons. It's a pretty insular and self-
involved world.

An artists biggest skill in this market has little to do with their technical
skill. Technical skill is easy and can be purchased on Fiverr if you need.

Art schools are part of this market.

Most people on the other hand don't go to galleries. They buy prints, hallmark
cards, download wallpapers from DeviantArt, etc. Illustrators and graphic
designers are thriving in this market, but are totally ignored by the high
brow market (unless you get big enough).

Basically, it's just artists following market demands.

~~~
SiVal
I have a relatively simple rule about what is and isn't art. It doesn't have
to be everyone's rule--it's just my rule:

Nothing is objectively art; art is always in the eye of the beholder, but it's
only real art to someone if they would want it even if no one else ever saw
it.

Take a toilet nailed to the wall. If the person who created this thing would
have done so if he had known that no one else would ever see it, if he would
have nailed the toilet to his own wall at home knowing that he was the only
one who would ever see it just because HE HIMSELF wanted to look at it, then
it really is art to him. It's not any art that I'm interested in, but that
doesn't matter. All art is subjective. It is a genuine expression of his own
esthetic desires. It IS art to him.

But if he would never consider such a thing for himself, if it's only part of
a show he puts on for others in hopes of getting paid ("it speaks to the
inhumanity of corporate greed...blah, blah" he explains greedily), then it's
just a commercial product. If it's nothing he would have any interest in
without the audience, but it's about getting attention, not money, then it's a
publicity stunt, not art. To the artist, it's not art. (If it really is art to
the artist, it can ALSO be a commercial product or publicity stunt while
remaining art to him.)

And if the wealthy customer would have no interest in it if he couldn't show
off his "statement" to others, then it's not art to him, either. It's some
sort of signalling, or a commercial investment, or whatever, but it's not art
to him. And if potential buyers knew that it was not even art to the artist,
what might that mean to them?

Of course, I can't be sure what really is in someone else's mind, but if I
doubt that the artist would sincerely want this poo-covered crucifix in his
own living room for his private enjoyment, nor that the rich people swooning
over its deep meaning would care if they couldn't show off their depth to
their friends, it means I'm doubting that this piece of junk is really art to
anybody.

~~~
johnchristopher
> But if he would never consider such a thing for himself, if it's only part
> of a show he puts on for others in hopes of getting paid ("it speaks to the
> inhumanity of corporate greed...blah, blah" he explains greedily),

You seem to be referring to Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (the urinal) and if so
you are missing the point.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_%28Duchamp%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_%28Duchamp%29)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readymades_of_Marcel_Duchamp)

> Take a toilet nailed to the wall. If the person who created this thing would
> have done so if he had known that no one else would ever see it, if he would
> have nailed the toilet to his own wall at home knowing that he was the only
> one who would ever see it just because HE HIMSELF wanted to look at it, then
> it really is art to him. It's not any art that I'm interested in, but that
> doesn't matter. All art is subjective. It is a genuine expression of his own
> esthetic desires. It IS art to him.

Art is a statement and you can't isolate that statement in a vacuum that would
cut it from its historical perspective.

> Nothing is objectively art; art is always in the eye of the beholder, but
> it's only real art to someone if they would want it even if no one else ever
> saw it.

Of course, but the context around the piece of art is indeed objective.

------
te_chris
In New Zealand we have two main types of post-secondary institutions:
Universities and Polytechnics. Polytechnics used to be technical training
institutes offering qualifications up to diploma level (2 years FT study); due
to some policy changes and liberalisations in the 1990's however this all
changed and they started being accredited to give full degrees (Bachelors and
Masters).

A lot of my friends are artists and this has enabled me to observe the results
of the different training people received. My friends who have been through
their BFA/BVA from polytechnics are much, much more accopmlished now, post-
school, than those who went through high-brow, university art schools
(particularly ELAM, in Auckland). The emphasis on concept at the university
schools is so overwhelming and (apparently) contagious for these students that
they forget about craft. The friends at the polytechnics received a more
balanced education, with a heavy emphasis on craft while still covering
concept, and they're doing far, far better now.

The only ones who seemed to survive the concept-heavy BFA and actually produce
sustainable work seem to be those who were so technically accomplished going
in that they could afford to take a few years off, thinking lofty thoughts,
and not affect their craft too much.

------
BruceIV
I visited the Tate modern art museum in London while on vacation this summer,
and left bothered by the idea of modern art. I could put a collection of
furnace ducts in a corner, or hang a mirror on the wall, or bedazzle an
internal combustion engine (all exhibits), but it wouldn't be art, because I
don't know why it's art, and neither would it take any particular skill. It
bothers me that this 'art' lacks both skill and approachability. As a PhD
student, I'm no stranger to obscure academic fields that can't be understood
by anyone outside your narrow specialization, but at least even the most
obscure theoretical work in computer science might actually be useful to
people who aren't theoretical computer scientists, and that possible future
approachability to people outside the field seems to be lacking in modern art.

~~~
normloman
Let's play devils advocate: If spilled paint on a canvas, and accidentally
produced a fresco by Raphael, would it cease being beautiful (because it took
no skill to make?). Do you go to art galleries just to be impressed by
someone's skill? Is art a talent competition?

Furthermore, what is unapproachable about a collection of furnace ducts? It's
not to hard to understand. Just a pile of ducts. Does art always have present
you with a puzzle to figure out, or contribute to some theory? Why can't I say
"Look, a pile of ducts. Neat, huh?"

~~~
IgorPartola
By that logic, you should come see me play the guitar and sing. I am terrible
at both (really, truly terrible; not being shy, objectively, you-would-rather-
listen-to-nails-on-glass terrible). But you should come see me express myself
and attempt to do this. It will be super artistic, I promise.

The thing is, we agree that there is music and there is noise. People draw the
line in different places, but we all agree that it exists. Why is it that I
can literally shit on the floor in front of you and when you yell "what the
fuck is this?" I can answer "it's art" and have the audience go "oh, he's
good!"? Is it perhaps because, no matter what, I can say that my brand of art
is just so new, so advanced, that nobody has understood it yet? Then have some
PhD candidate years from now write a dissertation on how I managed to portray
the human condition to validate the shit I put out.

Wow, that turned into a rant...

~~~
scotty79
I define art as creation that does not have to do anything but could invoke
some feelings in the recipient.

What's important is that you don't have to like art. If it evokes feelings in
you that you don't like then just stay away from it. Appreciating art is not a
contest. If someone expects you to appreciate same art as them that's their
problem with expectations management not yours with performance. I would come
to hear you play but if your music would invoke feelings in me that I wouldn't
want then I'd leave. Some other person might like the chaos brought by lack of
skills crossed with enthusiasm.

The problem starts when people start talking about art ... they say dumbest
things and often get away with it.

~~~
tomjen3
That is very close to what I consider art, with the proviso that it should
invoke the feelings the artist intent (or tell the story the artist intent)
and that simply being annoyed at what people can waste government subsidies on
should not be considered a feeling.

~~~
scotty79
I think invoking feelings artist intended or even requiring artist to intend
to invoke specific feelings is too high of a standard. I agree with you on the
second point.

------
vilhelm_s
I think we will probably be fine, for the reason the author mentions in this
paragraph:

> Just walking down the halls you could tell which classes were those of the
> fine art department. They were always sitting in circles and talking. In the
> foundation, illustration, and design classes the students were working;
> drawing, painting, designing. I had great students who went on to become
> successful fine artists, but who had to enroll in the illustration
> department to get the necessary skills (anatomy, perspective, painting
> technique) to produce representational fine art. Ironically, but not
> surprisingly, this famous school's most famous fine artists stem from the
> illustration department, not its theory heavy fine art department.

I.e., skill in representational art is still being taught and valued. It just
changed label, from "fine art" to "illustration".

------
IgorPartola
It seems that the modern idea of "art" is something that (a) has not been done
before and (b) something that makes you pause and think "is this art?" To me
this is a very bad way of separating art from failed attempts. First, I do not
think that you can objectively call something "art" just because it's creator
called it that. They can be an artist and call it whatever they want, the same
way that I can write a bunch of 1s and 0s and say "that is a beautiful
computer program"; in other words some stuff artists create is not art, it's
attempts at art.

Secondly, art need not be novel. I enjoy sculpture, such as marble and bronze
statues from Ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the Renaissance era Europe.
There are lots of very similar pieces here. They all use the same mediums,
similar techniques, very similar themes, and share an overall style. Yet, I
enjoy this type of art. Why? Because it is so difficult to make rock look like
a moving human body. Throwing dog vomit on the floor of an art gallery as
commentary on the current geopolitical situation may be novel, but it is not
art in my book.

Edit: as an exercise, compare Rodin's sculptures to those of Joel Shapiro. Can
you really say that these are somehow on the same level?

~~~
Detrus
Is Joel Shapiro special and famous? His work looks boring but there is more
than enough aesthetic mastery in art today, someetimes on par with Rodin.
Abstract, surreal, real, take your pick.

Just took a quick scroll through a popular portal:

[http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-question-of-integrity-will-
get...](http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-question-of-integrity-will-get-finer-
and-finer-and-more-delicate)
[http://www.xavierhufkens.com/exhibition/2006-09-antony-
gorml...](http://www.xavierhufkens.com/exhibition/2006-09-antony-gormley)
[http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-bastard-form-of-mass-
culture-i...](http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-bastard-form-of-mass-culture-is-
humiliated-repetition-always-new-1) [http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-randomness-
to-which-mutation-t...](http://butdoesitfloat.com/The-randomness-to-which-
mutation-testifies-is-implicit-in-the-very) [http://www.stephan-
balleux.com/index.php?id=2](http://www.stephan-balleux.com/index.php?id=2)

There is so much of this it will take one weeks to wad through just the
quality work. And then there is a huge sea of ugly dog vomit. Just as with any
product category, if you put enough crap out there, someone will bite. If
everyone sees mostly crap, they think this is as good as it gets and bite en
masse.

The schools producing dog vomit artists are providing a valuable service to
the art market by adding variety.

~~~
IgorPartola
Minor note: I have seen Shapiro's work in at least two major museums and one
minor one. The latter was actually featuring Rodin's work at the time.

------
primelens
Most contemporary art needs to be illuminated by some mumbo-jumbo narrative
about what it "means" before one can appreciate it. I get the fact that one of
the things that makes art great is that it pushes the envelope on accepted
norms - stretches the bounds of tradition. To have mere skill and
craftsmanship and no individual vision does not make great art. But for me,
the reverse should also hold - you can't have a total lack of coherence or
skill and just get by on a pretension of "edginess." Unfortunately that is all
that seems to matter in contemporary institutionalized art.

I am repeatedly surprised by how contemporary early modern art (a.k.a.
renaissance art) -- both literature and the visual arts -- seem to me at time
and how they can combine truly radical innovations with an unwavering
commitment to basic skills. Write that searing tragedy about the frailty and
absurdity of the human condition ... but make sure you absolutely master your
iambic pentameter first!

~~~
groby_b
I'm surprised by this repeated statement that modern art doesn't hold skill.
Most of the artists I know have enjoyed a very good education in the
underlying skills, but then _chose_ to break the rules.

Is there a lot of pretense trying to sell art? Yes, absolutely - but it never
lasts. _Good_ contemporary art is exactly what you ask for. A solid foundation
of skills used to completely abandon any conventional display of these skills.

~~~
lmm
Let's get concrete; do you have examples? Particularly painting. I went to the
Pinakothek der Moderne a few months ago and was really struck that, whereas in
most "modern art" galleries I can find paintings I like, in one that restricts
itself to post-1920 there was really nothing thought-provoking, nothing
beautiful, nothing that even seemed like an expression of skill. There were
interesting works in other media, but it really seems like painting has fallen
by the wayside.

~~~
lstamour
If you're seriously judging all post-1920s art, or painting ... take a step
back. There's plenty of art out there, more everyday. A short search on Google
helped me discover this one, for instance:
[http://fineartamerica.com/featured/arc-de-triomphe-leonid-
af...](http://fineartamerica.com/featured/arc-de-triomphe-leonid-afremov.html)
Not to mention all the examples presented in this huffington article. There's
plenty of skill in painting, the question perhaps remains, and has for some
time -- if you have new tools, like computers, photoshop and photography, does
that change the skill or quality of a painting or other artwork? Does it
devalue it? Place greater emphasis on it? Perhaps what's sad is that
universities are required to produce fine art in the first place, now that
we've so many new models to follow for education...

~~~
lmm
I'm judging the paintings in that particular gallery, and more widely the
academic and gallery culture - of course there are beautiful paintings being
made every day, by people with or without artistic education.

If you can recommend a gallery of pictures like that I'll add it to my visit
list. It looks like Afremov went to a technical university, which is in line
with the sibling thread where te_chris is arguing that (grossly
oversimplifying) polytechnics give a better-rounded art education than
academic universities.

~~~
lstamour
Sadly, I don't know art galleries. That was Google, after all. All I can say
is, every visit to the Art Gallery of Ontario, near my place, nets me 95% "not
my thing" to 5% "wow". All it takes is one "wow" each trip and it's
worthwhile. The same is probably true of many art galleries, hence why people
then try to collect the art they like, forming their own gallery. I wonder how
the concept of galleries will change as VR technology takes off? Right now
reproductions are two dimensional and cannot be interacted with in their
original space. But what happens if we "fix that"? ;-)

~~~
lmm
I've had a similar 95/5 (I'd like to say more like 80/20) reaction to a lot of
galleries, but most modern galleries I've been to (the Tate, or the one in the
Centre Pompidou) include some late-19th at least early-20th century stuff. And
until recently I'd have been a big defender of the value of these over older
collections.

I was struck because the Pinakothek is the first I've been to that makes a
three-way-split - the Alte Pinakothek for pre-19th century stuff, the Neue
Pinakothek for, I don't know the terminology, but the time in the middle, and
then the really contemporary works in the Pinakothek der Moderne. And I
absolutely loved the Neue Pinakothek - loads of really beautiful paintings,
with a variety of styles but almost all of them being the kind of
representational/skilled work the article's talking about (or your link).
Really recommend it if you're ever in Munich. And then I walked across the
road to the Pinakothek der Moderne, looking forward to a real treat, and I was
just really struck by how bad it all seemed, how much worse every painting was
than any of the ones I'd just been looking at.

~~~
groby_b
Ah. Now I get you.

Pinakothek der Moderne is a lot of post-moderism, which is... mixed. There's a
lot of conceptual art there which is brilliant, but in a cerebral sense, not
visceral. It's not representational, though - that's the point of a lot of
post-modernism, to rebel against established art ideas.[1]

They still do have stuff that might appeal to you, IIRC - August Macke, Franz
Marc, Miro, Emil Nolde come to mind.

[1] That doesn't mean it's unskilled. But the skill is hidden in the breaking
of all rules of skill, and it's occasionally hard to tell if it's incompetence
or deliberate, unless you spent a lot of time on art history.

------
nether
I expect a discussion here as fruitful as one composed of fine arts majors
talking about programming languages.

~~~
raverbashing
Unfortunately I agree

The variance in field of competences in commenters is tiny here, and to add
injury to it, there's a strong sentiment of "STEM == Good, all the rest is
crap"

~~~
tekromancr
You know, I have only ever seen that sentiment described. I've never actually
seen anyone say that STEM is the only viable pursuit.

~~~
lstamour
I think it all comes down to "what gets measured gets managed" of unknown
origins[1] where if we have English and Math tests for middle and high school,
we in turn value it more. Particularly during budget discussions. The opposite
is true in university, though once you specialize, it's easy to see the other
specializations as "not as useful" as your own, an entirely different bias
perhaps.

[1] [http://athinkingperson.com/2012/12/02/who-said-what-gets-
mea...](http://athinkingperson.com/2012/12/02/who-said-what-gets-measured-
gets-managed/)

------
kqr2
Peter Bagge's comic critique of modern art:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080517130730/http://www.reason...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080517130730/http://www.reason.com/0408/bagge.shtml)

------
dbbolton
Reminds me of the sentiment in "No Skill No Art":
[http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/noskill.htm](http://www3.sympatico.ca/manideli/noskill.htm)

------
loomio
> Maybe worst for me personally was most all straight forwardly
> representational work was labeled "illustrative" and discounted as
> "commercial."

While I find the "deskilling" of arts to be troubling, and experienced
frustration at the lack of technical education as a fine arts student, this
line made me realise that what might be deep underneath this is a rejection by
those in search of "authentic" art in the face of rampant commodification by
advertisers.

In a world where the true human value of art is judged by the proxy of
commercial value, and many of the greatest talents are using their abilities
not to further human culture but to sell products, it's not irrational for
people to seek art that cannot be commodified. It's a collective search for
authenticity that's unfortunately flailing and grasping at straws instead, of
unpacking the deeper causes caught up with larger social and economic
currents.

------
sitkack
This doesn't have anything to do with "modern art" it is a backlash against
accuracy, precision and at the root, intellectualism and power derived from
skill. Pol Pot and Punk Rock have a lot more in common than one would first
notice. Originally, Punk was about the message and the adherents looked past
the technical flaws, they viewed have skill as an un-necessary toll on
communicating your art. If you are "raw" your message will shine through the
flaws. But this rawness became calcified in the genre causing it to be a core
tenet rather than an artifact. One could not be Punk and be good (skillful) at
the same time.

------
asgard1024
Maybe it's unrelated, but I have a real beef with modern flat UI design and
icons.

For worst examples, look up the modern Microsoft production, such as VS 2012
or Lync 2013. Is the future really _that_ ugly?

These just seems to me, compared to old, nice colorful icons, as drawings of
6-year olds. I can't shave off the feeling that they are just cheap. Or maybe
it's the consequence of de-skilling the article is writing about?

------
ArkyBeagle
"I'd rather look at Leyendecker ads all day than Picasso for five minutes. "

[http://sippicancottage.blogspot.com/2014/08/like-watching-
al...](http://sippicancottage.blogspot.com/2014/08/like-watching-alphonse-
mucha-do.html)

(loves me some Sippican, for the curmudgeonly Yankee aroma it inspires )

------
yarrel
Yes.

------
dredmorbius
Fascinating topic. But flagging for HuffPo's persistent social icon bar on
mobile.

Lose that shit.

