You beat me to it, Phantast. Here in the SF Bay Area, there was a strong photorealist movement in painting which I believe lasted approx. 1968-1974, give or take a few years. Artists such as Richard Estes faced exactly these sorts of questions. I believe that the process of questioning why a painter would bother to make a picture that looked like a Poloroid snapshot was an important one, perhaps the raison d'etre for the movement, besides the other answer, which ernyoka1 answered so colorfully in post #2. But I'm not sure the aesthetic questions matter as much in the Poser world. If you buy, say, a photo-real texture from StefyZZ, chances are you're going to end up with a render more "photo-real" than if you were to use a hand-painted texture, whether or not you were thinking about issues of aesthetics. I don't happen to care whether my renders look "real" or not...I like it very much when they look cartoony, dreamlike, or painterly. I doubt if there's any one answer to Shoshanna's question, but IMO it's perfectly valid. Interestingly, a lot of people found the alleged realism of the Final Fantasy movie to be "disturbing."