Hmmm...
I agree with Penguinisto.
Only read a few replies.

I'm guilty of cutting corners as well as the next person, but some of the stuff I see in the gallery is just... pure crap. Sorry if that hurts anyone's feelings.

I totally agree on Light Sets btw. For cripes sake, lighting is the be-all and end-all of any image. Learn it! Sit down and see what you can do with one light. Two. Play with shaders, play with the shadow, athmosphere etc.
I guarantee you if I look at the gallery now I'll see the first page full of stuff I could knock out in five minutes flat, provided I got the bits used.
And if it's not right - do it again. Improve on it. Post it, act on constructive comments (if you get any, which isn't easy) and repost it.

I can't model worth a damn, but I fiddle with magnets a fair bit to tweak stuff.
The one thing I'm guilty of the most is that I'm impatient heheh.
I will render the 'almost right' rather than tweak more, but often I go back later and fix what turned messy.

Is it Art?
That depends.
If I use a prefab V3 & texture, prefab pose, prefab clothing & textures, prefab background, prefab lights, prefab surrounds.... and then hit render without doing anything else? Then no. It's not.

If I pose the thing myself, tweak settings of materials, make a bumpmap where there is none, change a texture to be more what I need for the figure, possibly displace some bits with my own displacement map, pull on the mesh some with a magnet to iron out a crease / lump / bump ill fitting something or other... yank it over to Vue/Bryce/Carrara to have a "homegrown" background... paint in the hair in Photoshop, tweak levels, postwork errors... (Any or all of those I mean)
To me, the result is more Art than the previous example. Because you spent the time to get it "right" even if it's not "right" in every aspect.

THAT is what Peng is talking about. A little effort goes a long, long way.
Practice - as they say - makes perfect.

Those going with the first option are the ones hurting the Poser community. Those going with the second option... stand a better chance of being taken semi seriously.
I say semi seriously, because the first option already ruined Poser's credibility and (generally) it's the best we can hope for.

If that's elitist... ok. Fine. I'd like to think I'm more of a perfectionist than an elitist. For one thing I'm nowhere near good enough to be an Elitist lol. If something produces a good end result and if I can see the creativity of the user shine through on the render - then I would never dream of dismissing it, regardless of the medium.

Silke