Glenn Adamson Thinking Through Craft, Oxford: Berg 2007, pp.69-101

The conflict between the workmanship of certainty and workmanship of risk has been viewed as the matter of skill and how it influences art. How then, art is perceived by different artists are discussed in the article.

Art embodies diverse views on skill which binary situations exist where art is debated as something that is produced upon skill, creativity or else. Skill is mentioned as “experience”(Adamson, 79). To me, experience is the knowledge you gain from the uncountable numbers of trials you go through without any restrains to realise the characteristics of a material or to gain the understandings of materiality and be able to obtain the result you aimed for. Therefore, skill and ideas are explored based on experimentations and experiences, which can be summarised as learning by doing (Reid).  In the article, Jason Pollock says, “It doesn’t make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement” (Adamson, 69). Similar to art education or in arts field, it is becoming more about something literal than visual aspects of what has been made. This means that there are more emerging groups of artists in that context, contemporary art or conceptual art. Looking at previous article, “anything is permissible in the contemporary art world so long as it is pedigreed, substantiated, referentialized.”(Kraus, 147), it makes me question where skill actually stands in art. If anything is possible and anything could be turned into art as long as it has something to explain and support the work, what is skill and do you need it? If there are no restraints in giving the artistic value to any work, is skill really important? It makes me think it is not the skill of workmanship that matters but it is the skill of language, skill of putting the ineffable to the effable is what is important in art at present.

Thierry de Duve - "When Form Has Become Attitude - And Beyond"

Thierry de Duve “When Form Has Become Attitude – And Beyond” (1994), Theory in contemporary art since 1945, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, pp.19-31

This article deals with the question of what art actually is and how it is viewed differently from various aspects, comparing the important issues that are similar to each other but may seem to be oppositional matters in art education.

The curiosity has been raised thinking about what the answers are to what the good education of art is. Art has become a generous subject nowadays which it allows a variety of groups of people to produce and engage with art without any talent. But what is talent indeed? When the article has mentioned about talent and creativity, talent is something that is limited and inherent abilities given to only a certain number of people who are capable of doing something perfectly and able to play within the boundaries of perfection.  But whereas creativity is something that makes art lose its value from historical aspects and allows to generate a new field of art which is developing and taking over the education in academy to get people educated in what it is called, “contemporary art”; anything can be turned into art. Looking back at my history in art, during college, we learned to produce perfect paintings or drawings of objects and learned to imitate an artist model in order to establish a new style of painting of my own. However, since education in university began, that progress of developing art skills has been put aside. We began to learn more on the side of "creativity". We have gone through both types of education and have experienced both. It is up to individuals to evaluate which of the two is suitable for generating artists. From the text, it made me curious about different categorized aspects of art. What are the things that make art? What should be included and what should not be to make a good art? These are the things I have never realised before looking at art from these perspectives. To me, I do not think one could insist art is a matter of one or another.   

Dan Fox “Contemporary Art and Culture?”, Frieze Issue 136, January – February 2011, pp.104 – 105

The similar way of comparing related matters. This text also looks at problems and it talks about critical issues about art and the relations to politics as well as the general issues of the world.