I have a MA in art and am currently on a commision that selects a painting professor for one of the prolific central european art schools. I have never heard of the guy.
There is a lot of art that is basically just crafts. Technically skilled and beautiful to many people who have been to a museum once or twice (and there are many of those!) — people are baffled by the fact that someone can paint realistically — ignoring a rich art history that should make clear that doing just that is the bare minimum and clearly not the point of good art.
But in the end all those works are more or less uninteresting beyond that. They lack the stuff that makes Mona Lisa's smile famous, the stuff that Hopper has in his pictures, the crows over the fields in Van Goghs paintings, Yves Kleins blue etc. If your art lacks the art while delivering technical skill it will still remain ultimately hollow. And if your ownly impact your art makes on the world is fighting your critics you should wonder why you are doing it.
There is a lot of art that is basically just crafts. Technically skilled and beautiful to many people who have been to a museum once or twice (and there are many of those!) — people are baffled by the fact that someone can paint realistically — ignoring a rich art history that should make clear that doing just that is the bare minimum and clearly not the point of good art.
But in the end all those works are more or less uninteresting beyond that. They lack the stuff that makes Mona Lisa's smile famous, the stuff that Hopper has in his pictures, the crows over the fields in Van Goghs paintings, Yves Kleins blue etc. If your art lacks the art while delivering technical skill it will still remain ultimately hollow. And if your ownly impact your art makes on the world is fighting your critics you should wonder why you are doing it.