So i made a post about this a few weeks ago and then when viewing it on mobile i fucking managed to delete it on accident in an incident that I feel very bad and silly about even today. I haven't rewritten it because I didn't feel like I had anything more to say about it but just now I thought of something that I do want to add so if you'll forgive me I'll try and do that.
To summarize from last time, I feel like people grossly misuse the "I could do that" response when talking about art. It's usually used dismissively when someone wants to criticize abstract art for not requiring real skill because "they could have done that."
And like a lot of people have talked about how objectively wrong and patently useless that attitude is so I won't rehash it, but what I said in my first post was that looking at art and thinking "I could do that" is used to dismiss the value of the art you're looking at, when really it should be an invitation to try. Because I have reached a point where I am looking at art from people I admire and I've developed enough skill to look at what they've done and be able to deconstruct how they did it, to be able to plot out the process in my head for how I would have made this, and how that's actually an exciting and valuable place to be able to reach with your art. Being able to see artists as peers, being able to say "I could do this" as a way of learning from other artists and affirming your own skills, is such a nice feeling that it deserves to be recognized apart from people being snobs.
Anyways, what I wanted to add about this is that I realized I kept obsessively bothering myself over small details in my artwork, but the things I thought were keeping me from being "good enough" as an artist are things that I've started to catch in other artists that I consider much, much better than me. I realized it's because when I am working, I only see the details because I'm zoomed in on my canvas, but in other's artwork i'm focused on the whole piece first and only notice those details afterwards.
My point here being that the idea that pure technical skill, rendering, the ability to represent reality, do not play nearly as big a role in (at least) my personal enjoyment of art as does just, like, the holistic picture, the total effect, the way that the full composition brings details together in a satisfying way. So being able to see in other people's work the things I considered defects in my own helps me shift perspective back to what the overall impact, the effect of the entire composition is, and that has helped me to do my art more effectively than when I was trying to fixate on perfecting small details and individual lines and strokes.