Mediocrity loves details and the digital medium allows the mediocre artist to put in extraordinary amount of details by the simple process of zooming. By zooming-in on a small area, the artist can paint-in almost microscopic elements of form (and much of those microscopic details are derived from various photographs that are placed on the under-layer of the digital canvas). And the details seem to impress the masses. They always have. Even in the past, artists' were judged on how realistic, how true to life, their images looked. And today's art proliferates with realistic, highly detailed images created with such digital medium as the Adobe Photoshop. The fantasy genre is especially ripe in this style of art. The average digital painting of today is like a large pot into which the chef threw-in every ingredient he had in his kitchen, simmered the concoction for a few hours and served it stirred (not shaken, shaking the mess may dislodge some of those precious details. Actually that is what every artist and architect and designer should do to their work before calling it finished. Shake it vigorously so as to dislodge any meaningless detail debris from the work. What is left should be strong fundamentally, structurally and conceptually (but don't forget to vacuum afterward. There is no need to preserve the debris fro future generations). Unfortunately, much of today's work that I've come across, if you shake it there will be little if anything left on the artboard. The entire artwork is made out of nothing but detail debris that is held together with "atmospheric color".). Details are part of what makes great art great. But it is the well chosen details that contribute something meaningful to the subject of the artwork, not the meaningless proliferation of details that essentially result in visual pollution.
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