I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love.
Art is for the elite because it has a very high price-point of entry. And when one is in that social strata, they look down at illustrators because they just draw things directly for a few hundred dollars, and that's seen as being a bit grubby. Galleries allow artists to stay relatively divorced from the financial aspects of their trade.
The problem with doing physically ambitious art is that to view it, you still have to be in your physical body.
Sketching in general - anywhere, not just in Gitmo, but in life, in the world - is a profoundly disruptive act. Because you're creating something when you're kind of expected to consume or sit passively. I've always sketched things as a way to get into them, whether it was a fancy nightclub or, you know, to have kids think I was cool, whatever.
Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you're taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you're sketching them. They can look at you and say, 'Oh man, you got me wrong.'
I think Picasso was someone who took art's powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That's something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now.
