Skill

For of course I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it's an expert gardner at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won't slip. I don't think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn't matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist kitsch, no matter how much of the demos love it. To me, it is a form of manufactured tyranny. Some Australians feel this is a confession of antidemocratic sin; but I am no democrat in the field of arts, the only area - other than sports - in which human inequality can be displayed and celebrated without doing social harm.

Robert Hughes in A Bloody Expat, from Things I Didn't Know: A Memoir. To the last sentence, as well as sports, I'd add mathematics and science. For bracing, direct, and thoughtful commentary I highly recommend anything by Robert Hughes, even though I might not always agree with him.

One aspect of the model railroading medium that spans all uses and interpretations is the high regard held for skill amongst its practitioners. So much so that the associated magazines and journals, whether mainstream or specialist, showcase skill - tailored to the degree their editors deem their target audiences can appreciate - that they have a strong bias towards how-to instructional stories, layout tours, and research, in addition to advertising. And skill usually means a focus on making things realistic, operable, and reliable.

The relationship with ready-to-run items and commercial products that make things 'easier' is fraught. Over the decades the concern with skills degrading as technology and commercial offerings improve, and often exceeding what amateur hobbyists can do, remains ever present, even though the actors change. Is it a sin to buy or build plastic items in comparison to wood, paper, or metal? DCC versus DC? Kits versus scratchbuilding? Laser cutting, 3D printing, sheet cutters: are they ending traditional construction methods? Once again, discussing these independently of people and how they make use of - or don't - what constitutes the medium leads one astray. The question should be, what are people doing with the medium?

There's also the related issue about how much ready-to-run is too much. I think the question of skill also underlies this concern. Whether a layout is built completely from items purchased at swap meets or the latest high tech vendors is almost irrelevant if the owner exhibits no skill in doing whatever it is they're doing with the stuff.

As I mentioned before I'm reading old books from my shelves while I'm holed up at home, and what got me thinking about skill was the following passage from Gary Garrels' Drawing From The Modern 1945-1975  about deskilling as a practice of 20th century artists, viewed in light of David Hockney's comments on skill I noted in an earlier post. It struck me as being completely at odds with an unspoken ethos of model railroading, and model making in general. Even though some form or another of model construction has existed for centuries, it only seems to have taken off in a mass sense in the 20th century, so with its emphasis on the skill of the maker, it stands in contrast with a 20th century trend of artists willfully deskilling. 

While processes of "deskilling" have a long history in modernist art, the term has been in use in an art context for only a relatively short period of time. In one of the first published instances, in 1981, artist and critic Ian Burn used the term to a very specific kind of practice in which an artist delegated control of the technical making of the object to "skilled" workers, such as the industrial fabrication of Minimalist sculpture. Recently, the term's usage has grown to include a broader range of artistic activity, including the more widespread strategies of artists willfully renouncing learned, or traditional, habits of making in works they produce themselves. Like drawing with the left hand if right-handed, deskilling is meant to inhibit both repetition and easy elegance, and reliance on practiced abilities. A method of intentionally setting roadblocks in the studio, deskilling is one of a number of classic modernist operations intended to circumvent the often overly determined ways in which art is made and received, as well as to critique the romantic idea of the all-knowing, all-controlling genius artist.

You're right, I need to give all this a lot more thought, especially with regard to how long established ways of using the medium are overcome or modified to produce truly new works. In the above you've got a willing deskilling of the creator to produce new insights, and with model making it's commonly thought that only through individual upskilling that new and interesting objects are possible.