| When I was in middle-school (in the UK about the turn of the millennium) I had asked my school art teacher more-or-less the same question (I asked why, for the 3 years we'd be required to take art classes, we would only ever use physical media; and that it'd be doing students a disservice by excluding digital-painting (e.g. in Photoshop with a Wacom; or the then-much-hyped paint simulation in Corel Painter). She wasn't dismissive of digital-airbrushing; instead, the reasons for us not doing any digital-art in art class are the ones you'd reasonably expect: 1. The #1 reason is cost: in money, time, training, et cetera: physical hardware purchases, Photoshop or Painter licenses - and needing to keep those renewed - sending all the art teaching staff away for training on the software and digital-painting technique themselves - and more besides. 2. Art, as taught in middle-schools/lower-secondary-schools to children - not working professional adults - is concerned with breadth, not depth: digital-painting is a specific and narrow technique when compared to the applicability of teaching art-theory things like perspective, shading, etc. 3. The practical and technical aspects of producing visual-arts, including on a computer, are already taught in the elective graphic-design class in upper-secondary (while our lower-secondary art class was mandatory); she could probably tell that I was motivated more by my ego-driven need to demonstrate my own 1337 Photoshop skillz to others than any actual belief I had that everyone in the British economy needs exposure to Wacom and Photoshop and receives training so they can all have their own DeviantArt account. ----------- So now, in the event that some kids' art teachers or others are being broadly dismissive of digital-painting then they're likely pointing to the impracticality of it being a taught subject in mandatory education in public schools - and not that it's any "less" of an artform. Instead, I think it's worth comparing digital-painting to its own predecessor in (real-life) airbrush painting: just like digital-painting it requires its own hardware (think: expensive); while it can produce unique eye-catching results doing-so requires extensive practice; and is just as impractical to teach to large (25-30+) sized groups of kids en-masse; and won't help you appreciate a Monet or Renoir any more than a semester learning Photoshop would. |
If memory serves me right, the context was me going on a tangent about my interests, which is when I mentioned digital painting and asked her if she has any experience with it.
It was overwhelmingly clear to me that she was absolutely thinking less of it as an artform, and not just skeptical about the practicality of its classroom adoption or similar. I really don't think such a thought even occurred to her.
There is of course a chance I misunderstood, but based on how I remember her, I don't really have a reason to doubt myself in this way. She generally had a holier-than-thou quality across the board, separately from her intentions.