P.S.
Moved on but can't help adding another .0001 of a cent. In the course of learning the traditional craft and skill of painting a student has the opportunity to gain a personal relationship with the medium. During this time you are also developing your unique ideas about the world and they become interwoven. At a certain point art education changed. I remember a professor laughing because I wanted to put people in my work. WAAAAAAAY after the fact these dinossaur idiots were propogating the myth that figurative painting was passe, ancient history. So now you have generations of students who would now have to struggle just to render the simplest of representational forms because they have never been taught the skills. People are inherrently lazy and once you've gotten the diploma, how many do you think would start over even if they suspected there was something shallow and meaningless in painting blobs, squares and circles in the 21st century. Sure, wind up an abstract painter by way of evolution - sincere interest in a certain aspect of the visual experience, but don't start out that way because now you have no choice. Of course, teach thinking out of the box as well, encourage originality but DON'T limit ones options. The universities were hiring these losers who were incredibly limited not only in skill but even a modicum of development in whatever malarky they were producing. Discipline, a degree of traditional training teaches discipline and focus and depth of understanding of the visual world. The mind can now envision a thing and see it in three dimensions and render it. Once you make that process overwhelming the potential artist sets out with a shallow base and limited posibilities.
Add to that that commericalism is no longer a dirty word (though even the most idealistic artists of the past secrety wanted to be commercial successes - with a few exceptions) and you now have some of the most creative minds guiltlessly going to animation, advertising, web design, film, you know the list. I have to stop, soooo sorry to anybody who took the time to read this tome. Hot topic for me - obviously.
AI
