Call for CAA Panelists

Open call for CAA 2019 Annual Conference. New York, NY, February 13—16, 2019. New York Hilton Midtown.

Deskilling in the Age of Trump
Abstracts due 8/6

The artist’s strategy of deskilling, at its noblest, is a move that Claire Bishop writes, “is less preoccupied with conceptual maneuvers than with generating in the beholder the desire to make and do.” This desire, as the 2016 election of Donald Trump in the United States makes explicit, reveals the precariousness of such a proposal. With disciplinary reorientation - long a tenet of deskilling’s possibility – tethered to Trump’s willful and dangerous ignorance of capable governance, how might we justify, differentiate, and continue to valorize works of art or practices that find themselves ideologically aligned with a new mainstream form of deskilling that has become a disconcerting political aesthetic? This panel welcomes art historians, artists, curators, theorists, and others seeking to investigate how deskilling – on the internet, performance art, D.I.Y., conceptual arts – might be understood in this moment, where the artisanal is both demanded and denied, where the beholder’s desire to make and do might be romantic but also mandated.

Send proposals: [email protected]