What are the most important skills an artist can have?

Use the following questions and related media as a way to initiate dialogue about contemporary art and specific ideas related to where art is seen, how it is made, and who makes it. Related images and video segments should inspire a variety of responses and provoke new ways of thinking about possible answers.

What are the most important skills an artist can have?

Fred Wilson. "By Degree," 1995. Ceramic and painted porcelain, 8 X 7 X 11 1/4 inches. Photo by Kerry Ryan McFate. Courtesy The Pace Gallery, New York.

"I really don't have any desire to make things directly with my hands. I don't know when I left that behind, because I studied art, but I get everything that satisfies my soul from the kinds of things that I do—bringing objects that are in the world and manipulating them, working with spatial arrangements, and then having things produced the way I want to see them. My work is strongly visual. I'm not a conceptual artist who is only interested in the idea. It's really rooted in the visual. That's where I get excited. But I have a great need for structure in a conceptual thread—perhaps throughout the works in a project—almost like a matrix more than a structure."
—Fred Wilson

Watch: Mark Dion: Methodology