Bodies and Artifacts (iv-b)—Jean and LeRoi together again

(previously)

Whereas Jean makes much of

the elements of craft, technique, proven methods which make the artist a worker in a working world,
(p. 406)

LeRoi bends over backward to downplay this part.

as I have said before, Negro music is the result of certain more or less specific ways of thinking about the world. Given this consideration, all talk of technical application is certainly after the fact.
(p. 211)

And earlier,

The trumpets, trombones, and tubas of the brass bands were played with a varying amount of skill, though when a man has learned enough about an instrument to play the music he wants to play, "skill" becomes an arbitrary consideration.
(p. 75)

This last statement especially lays bare the disjuncture, since for Jean skill cannot be arbitrary, and the reason it cannot be arbitrary is because it forms a/the basis upon which a newly-minted work of art, no matter how stylistically esoteric, is never quite as unfamiliar as the plebes' visceral indigestion tells them that it is. Jean's theory is every bit as sociological as LeRoi's, but the two writers appeal to this sociological angle with entirely different agendas in mind.

Bodies and Artifacts (iv-a)—A Story of Jean and LeRoi

Jean Cassou
"The Nostalgia for a Métier"
in
Art History: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (1963)
ed. Wylie Sypher
pp. 399-409

Think of the tragedy of modern artistic consciousness. Try to discern first of all what it really is. We are led back to the inception of the creative act, where the artist can do only what springs from himself alone; and without knowing what his work will be or how it will be received (save that he is utterly sure it will be refused) he appears as a nearly unknown, useless, nameless creature...

It is the grandeur and honor of modern art to have put the accent on this first step in the artistic process, that of conceiving, to have reduced the definition of art itself to conceiving, it being clearly understood that each conception is not an a priori abstraction, that it comes into being only by manifesting itself as a form. But in that form what [it?] signifies is its problematic character: it is a proposal, a hypothesis, an abnormal and subversive venture. And its inventor can only doubt its viability. For in its behalf he has no guarantee, no guarantor. No teaching has guided him in developing it, and since he is alone in his corner and it in no way resembles things produced by certain, sanctioned, and regular methods, it seems to him that the world will not know what to make of it.