The article, to me, comes across as focused on art as a job, especially sentences like "greater creativity and success in creative careers". There's a ring of self-help/pop business that just strikes me as artless.

> Nothing inherently requires art

Of course not: I've used academic in the precise sense of people deciding to go through the institutions of art, and coming out with a noticeable lack of tasteful intelligence. Is art education just a quest for social self-realization? is it a sinecure for the happy few? That I have no idea illustrates the point.