The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art After the Readymade

Abstract

This book looks at the dialectical relationship between skill and deskilling in art after the ‘readymade.’ Focusing on Marcel Duchamp in the first half of the book it challenges the idea that the readymade constitutes an act of anti-art nihilism or is a simple stylistic turn. On the contrary the use of the readymade represents the basis for the transformation of art’s relationship with what Roberts calls “general social technique” (the relationship between art’s place in the social and division of labour and technological transformation).