I have a friend who's an architect (MS, Columbia) but was originally trained as a civil engineer (BS, NYU) and this sort of of thing is one of his pet peeves. His feeling is that many architects are "artsy-fartsy snobs who can't calculate the load on a beam" and cover up their ignorance of how to actually build things with talk about "enclosing spaces" and "visual metaphors". Their buildings are impractical, unmaintainable, uncomfortable, and ugly, and yes, they leak. Sometimes they're impossible to build and an engineer has to intervene during construction to modify the design so the structure can actually be assembled.

What really gets him is that when this is pointed out to them, they often feel that the real creativity is in the "concept" and "design", and the actual details like how much concrete has to be poured or how much rebar is needed to reinforce it, are beneath them, and more the province of "mere contractors". He mentioned one very famous building in this league (I will remain silent because national pride may be insulted)
where the prize-winning structure was actually incapable of maintaining its complex shape. It took an engineering crew to develop entirely new construction techniques and materials so that the structure was light enough to stand, yet strong enough to keep from falling apart. The construction costs, of course, skyrocketed.

Some architects, like Frank Lloyd Wright, had their technical deficiencies, and their buildings had flaws, but the beauty and friendliness of the finished product more than made up for it. They are buildings you want to be in. They feel good around you. MY friend respects Wright highly, while still criticizing his shortcomings, but points out "these guys ain't him".

Most 20th century artists fell in this competence trap. They recognized that
mastery of the fundamentals does not make an artist, just a good illustrator. But no one can be an artist until they have mastered the fundamentals. Technical expertise is a necessary, but not sufficient condition, for the production of art. But it is still necessary. Creativity and talent without study and experience is just the mark of a dilettante. The reverse mis is just a draftsman.

The puerile barbarians that characterize modern art today fancy themselves the inheritors of the cubists and impressionists of a century ago, as if their incomprehensible scribblings could be compared
with those masters. Their defense: they claim their critics don't understand their work. Nonsense. The modernists like Picasso had already mastered the techniques of over two thousand years of Western art before they began their journeys of iconoclastic exploration.
One line, a single brush stroke on canvas, and it is somehow the essence of the shape and flow of a woman's hip. That does not come easily.

It should not be the refuge of the artist to hide behind the conceit that the public is not ready or too esthetically unsophisticated to truly appreciate his work. It's the artist's job to communicate to the typical, fairly intelligent human being. If he can't reach him, he's a fraud.

The first time I saw "Guérnica" it was still in New York--MOMA or the Guggenheim, I can't remember which. I came around a turn, looked up, and there it was. The curators had displayed it brilliantly, for maximum effect. I was familiar with the painting, I had studied it in school, and I was always a bit contemptuous of its monotonous grays and its distorted, misshapen subjects,
men and beasts. But I wasn't ready for the real thing. The sheer size of it overwhelmed me, I didn't realize it was so big, and the frozen agony of the horror that was first unleashed on the world that day staggered me. That's what art is supposed to do.