Art Ability Versus Skill

Do you need ability to be an artist? Is talent a prerequisite?  If you have ever listened to bad karioke, you may answer that with a resounding "Yes! You need talent and people without it should be told so." It's true that talent is something you were born with, or were not gifted with, according to your nature. But ability can be learned and so can skill.

Skill of course is when an ability reaches a standard of perfection that is accepted as art through the repetition of creation and the training of the body's motor abilities to perform an action automatically. Someone with ability can fairly easily teach themselves skills through trial and error, from reading books and from repeating the moves. They can be mentored and learn better or more complex skills or learn more quickly by benefiting from what another artist can teach from their own lifetime's experience in these skills.

But a high level of skill is not everything to everyone. People do many things because they simply enjoy doing them and the ability versus skill argument may stop them from taking pleasure in something which it is their right to pursue if they so choose. Everyone has a right to create and to do things that give them pleasure. Someone who owns a piano but has very little ability to learn to play it, can still sit and hit the keys and pick out a tune and enjoy the sound of music. By simply having the instrument in their own home, they can also perhaps enjoy the skill of someone who can play piano, more frequently. Their own ability may never reach a high level of skill but by adopting the means they have something they enjoy in their lives.

Art is just making the best of things - literally. Garbage is created everyday in huge quantities and we don't think twice about tossing it. It's not so easy to throw away something that has touched us. We strongly value something we have spent time making.

Manufacturing has taken away our common human right to create. With so much available to purchase that is of a high quality, we don't feel so motivated to use our abilities to gain skills to create what can only be, in comparison, amateur or unskilled art. And we cannot progress from amateur to any greater skill without first starting as a raw canvas.

We have come to believe that an audience must be large, that fame is the only prize, and that we cannot reach for or compare with the stars. OK. We cannot all have the ability to be Olympians, but does this stop us from swimming or playing golf? Our lives are our choices. The ability to create something beautiful gives us pleasure. This is enough. An audience of no-one is enough. We do not create for prizes but for the pleasure it gives us, even when that enjoyment is the catharsis of pain, that is enough.

If you are seeking fame and fortune for your talent then you may discover it - or you may find that the sacrifices and compromises you need to make to attain it are too great to retain your enjoyment of the art. Again , that's a choice.

We sometimes complain there is no time to learn a new skill or improve our skill through repetition, but we choose what time we spend and where. We are no longer as a community gifted with talents from our tribes or assured of abilities from contact with our parents, but are instead babysat by boxes with comedian's and super heroes who both belittle us. Our concentration is fractured minutely by multitasking and even planned projects of value are cut to save costs to the barest minimum of ingredients. Yet still art survives and it does so because we, as human beings, need it.

Ability versus skill, it's really not important except for those who are reaching for Olympic standard medals. If you have sufficient ability to enjoy doing something then never let people say you don't have enough skill to do it well. Just do it and enjoy it.

How will you know if you have talent enough to reach an audience? Well, you have to share your art and its true that it is hard to know. Your family and friends will usually want to support you and yet they can also sometimes be your worst critics. Their own doubts can have such a detrimental effect on your creative effort that you give up before you even try for any other audience who might be more receptive. Rejection is part of art. In time either someone will listen and hear, see and believe or they will not. Commitment and endurance in this time is as much a part of success as ability or skill.

It is also true that someone can be highly skilled and yet appear to have no soul or heart. This is the art of communicating emotion. For some art forms a little ability and a lot of heart will take an artist further than a high level of skill or competence. This is where talent can be separated from both ability and skill. It is an instinctive knowledge of what works and what does not. It can't be taught or bought. Either you have it or you do not.