I knew men who were students at the Academie Julian in Paris, where I studied in 1888, thirteen years ago.  I visited the Academie this year (1901) and found some of the same students still there, repeating the same exercises, and doing work nearly as good as they did thirteen years ago.

At almost any time in these thirteen years they have had the technical ability enough to produce masterpieces. Many of them are more facile in their trade of copying the model, and they make fewer mistakes and imperfections of literal drawing and proportion than do some of the greatest masters of art.  

These students have become masters of the trade of drawing, as some others have become masters of their grammars. And like so many of the latter, brilliant jugglers of words, having nothing worthwhile to say, they remain little else than clever jugglers of the brush.

The real study of an art student is more a development of that sensitive nature and appreciative imagination with which he was so fully endowed when a child, and which, unfortunately in almost all cases, the contact with the grown-ups shames out of him before he has passed into what is understood as real life.
    - Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

Does a work of art carry a message of emotional siginficance? Does it remind you of something important, even if you don't know what that is? Something about the deeper workings of nature, of the universe, of life? 

Or is it merely the artist trying to impress you with his or her skill? That they are (or were) good students? That they know how to follow the rules?