Quote - Similarly, I can draw stick figures about as well as any child. And maybe if I had an interesting story to tell, I might choose to do that. But I doubt people would pay $1 billion dollars to see a 2 hour stick figure movie, no matter how good a story it is. Avatar, on the other hand... - well you see the point I hope.

The most moving piece of art I've ever seen hung in the National Art Gallery in Ottawa.  It was a massive canvas that covered an entire wall.  From a distance it looked like a single simple rectangle of red.  Standing in front of it, it was so large that the eye could not encompass it all; it was a sea of red to the edge of vision.  And all that red was composed of uncounted millions of tiny, individual, painstaking brushstrokes.  And off in the lower left-hand corner, almost invisible to the naked eye, was a single small area of red just slightly different in hue than the rest.  

The painting had taken years to paint, and it was painted by an artist in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, under Stalin.

Despite the best efforts of Soviet censors, this artist had successfully managed to convey the stultifying oppression with which he lived.  Standing before that canvas, I felt nearly smothered and claustrophobic.  It was an awesome piece of art -- and I have no doubt that many of the folks enamoured of "photorealism" would take one look at a huge red canvas and scoff audibly.

My argument is not that photorealism is not useful, but that it shouldn't be the goal in and of itself.  It is where art starts, not where it finishes.  And I might well watch a two hour stick figure movie; I certainly have no interest in seeing Avatar.  "The Spirits Within" taught me all I need to know about the value of CGI spectacle for spectacle's sake.