Hands Off

Since when did intellectual creativity cease to be a "skill". In so much talk about the "deskilling" of art people have forgotten the skill of thinking. Machines can make just about anything now, we no longer have a need for the sculptor to make a perfect, realistic bust of someone because we can just as easily take a picture. So for all intents and purposes making art as a form of mimicry is a dead skill. But yet we still have artists. I think the shift has been made to artists as thinkers and less as makers. Does it make Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle any less important once you know he had a crew of hundreds doing all the work?
So for people who want to wander aimlessly through a gallery using the artwork as a form of visual vicodin- then yes, there is a great crisis of deskilling. This also plays into audience. Who is your audience and what do you want them to get out of it?
Maybe if people took more than 2.3 seconds to look at a work it wouldn't matter if the piece came out of a kiln or out of a WalMart.