Initially NO

If the artist is using someone else’s technique, what does that make them? A model of a certain form of art.
I look into a gallery with an exhibition of an impressionist painter. I think about what would make an artist want to paint like another artist, from a country far away. I think about why people might want to hide their actual sense of their surrounds. The bare minimal with the stains of existence. It is reminiscent of a French painter Boudoair. I’ve seen this style also in Van Gogh, but he has used brighter colours and added something else that smacks in the face of the style he learnt to mimic.
This style has sense enough to have natural elements to, but it is a tin. And so is cartooning and without many animators working on the same project we wouldn’t have the movies and comics created that are so entertaining. So, replication of technique is a good skill to have. Modelling, as I call it when writing, also has a similar dream for writing fan-fiction, or to style of genre.

I walked along further and saw the second gallery’s exhibition. It gave me organic optical illusions, and huge paintings with a patch work weaves, up close and fascinating. The painters in this exhibition made what they had amazing. They chose the focal point that gave a dream. I was there, in the moment wondering about the fabric in the painting, with all senses open. The paintings I found difficult, were either something I didn’t understand well enough, or something that I could see was boiling over at the cramping of its style.

If I were to choose a style it would be the second one. But I won’t, because it belongs to people who understand it best. And guess what? I don’t need to, because if that’s what I did, I wouldn’t be supporting it, I’d be undermining it. There is a reason I say this. People who dream from the heart and soul and listen to the environment around them and know who they are. They don’t need to flitter to other souls to find contentment.
That said, I write. So, in that I do like to understand another’s tone and gait and gesture and accent, words and so much more. But these characteristics are going to be a character, they are never going to be me. I like being an individual. Because the stuff I hide, is to protect others. Now, that may sound silly, but it makes sense to me. And if that’s the reason others paint in the style of a French impressionist, then so be it.
Style is something people get used to, but it is never fixed. That’s why style guides and dictionaries change every two years or so. The earth needs change. That’s what it does. And humans are great visionaries of the change. Even those who do not use their eyes to see, talk of visions. It is the way the mind works to a large extent.

I continued my walk to a third exhibition I saw on the street. Clean lines, lots of bronze. Decorative, well put together work. Neat, efficient craft. The creation was a labour of replicating the same idea in varying ways to the point of a machine. I found it well suited to military interests.
And then there were the Grecian moulds cast in varying materials in furniture store. And I thought, what would happen, if a hundred thousand years in the future, people excavated those store dummies, which are now appearing with no heads for some reason (perhaps because: people with headless they minimalise the focus). What if then, those who found these plastic mannequins then decided to remake them and sell them as art. Hmm. The future would gain an interest in Headless Mannequinism.