Attached Link: The image that pissed off a Poser bigot

I know how you feel. My second ever bit of Poser art got trounced by somebody who took offense to my not having created any of the models. My reaction was initially, What the F? I credited where I got the models. I entered the drawing under Poser. It's not as if I was taking credit for what I didn't create. At that point, I hadn't encountered the prejudice against Poser. The Poser community is nice and helpful, so I wasn't prepared to get slammed for using the program. I think it was Anton who dismissed the guy as being jealous. Initially, I didn't think that was the case, but the more I thought about, the more I realized that was probably behind the reaction I got. The guy gave me a zero rating--which is more an angry response than anything else. Why should somebody get upset over a piece of artwork just because it was done in Poser and it's probably because he didn't like comparing the work he was modeling against an artwork created by somebody using better models. As everybody is saying, Poser is a tool. So is a pencil. A pencil is a very unsophisticated, completely low-tech tool. Yet, works of art can and have been created with a pencil. Not everybody can do that, but it's not the fault of the pencil. The same with Poser, Maya, or whatever. Neither software or art materials make an artist. They are just the means to an artistic end. Is Boris Vallejo less of an artist because he uses photos as reference? How about Grant Wood and his famous painting "American Gothic". The couple in the painting are based on photos taken of his sister and dentist. Leonardo DaVinci's paintings used live models as reference. Are these painters less painters because their work doesn't spring totally from their heads? Is Poser art? I don't know. Is Maya art?--No more so than Poser. The traditional art world isn't any more enamored with one program or another. Is a circle in a square really symbolizing man's place in the universe? Not to me, it's just a circle and a square and a huckster pretending to be an artist because he's thought for weeks about a concept and spent a couple minutes creating what is no more sophisticated than what a child could do. Is that art? According some critics, it is. Me, and most of the people in the world, don't think so. Remember last year's news story about a midwestern woman, Teri Horton, who found a newly discovered Jackson Pollock painting potentially worth millions of dollars? She bought it at an antique shop for a few bucks as a joke for her sister. She thought it was something scribbled by a child. To the art world, it might be a lost masterpiece. If you want to know how fickle "Art" is, the painting is either worth millions or nothing. Isn't that just as ridiculous about arguing whether Poser is art? The painting doesn't change if the art world validates it as a Pollock painting. Just perceptions change. The painting either has merits on its own or it doesn't. Otherwise, aren't we just talking about the Emperor's New Clothes? It's an indication of how meaningless it is to judge what art is. Anybody who thinks one program or tool makes them better than somebody using another is a fool. It's an irrational conceit. The tool doesn't make the artist.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon