Now now, I'm not sure I get the impression that good descriptive painting became necesarily unnecesary, but with photography, and film, and colorful images everywhere, in everyone's junk mail, it gets harder to convincingly answer the question Why paint something? There are still good painters doing it, and there are good painters who don't find it relevant to their aims. And long before 1920 there were plenty of descriptive painters who just weren't very interesting because they didn't ask themselves the harder questions.

I think practically everyone should learn to draw, but I'm not sure I should encourage kids to pursue a line of work that has almost no viable legitimate market. There's not much of a middle, and the high and low ends of the market are both saturated with sham commercial values, hokum, and fads. Quit if you can.