In Praise of Virtuosity?

Twentieth-century art, which saw the birth of readymade and conceptual art, was marked by a rupture with tradition and a questioning of the role of technical savoir-faire. During this period, practices bringing into play experience, process, and device led to the studio being abandoned by nomadic artists with a preference for site-specific or ephemeral art, while the advent of new technology contributed to the decline of the materiality of the object. Are these multiple approaches, which Yves Michaux ironically described as “the gaseous state of art,” in the process of being supplanted by a major resurgence of savoir-faire and the handmade object? 

The term “reskilling,” borrowed from the domain of professional training, designates the learning of new skills in order for certain trades to adapt to the needs of the market. Recently introduced into the field of ­contemporary art,¹ 1 - In this regard, see John Roberts, The Intangibilies of Form: Skill and Deskilling of Art After the Readymade, (London and New York: Verso, 2007). reskilling, or requalification, thus enhances the ­prestige of manual work — most notably through the revival of essentially abandoned artisanal techniques — and attributes value to the mastery of execution and the craftsmanship of a work as well as its material and decorative sophistication. In the context of industrial production, reskilling was a direct response to deskilling, a process whereby human expertise was rendered obsolete through the introduction of new technology. However, in the artistic domain such deskilling cannot be attributed purely to the effects of industrialization but also to the willingness of the avante-garde to break with the dictates of academicism. If virtuosity has always inspired admiration — and this until the present day — contemporary art has nevertheless succeeded in turning away from constraints associated exclusively with skills. In other respects, it is pertinent to examine the motivations behind this renewed interest in traditional techniques and the requalification of savoir-faire by observing their role within the context of contemporary art issues at the beginning of the twenty-first century.