Nope, Mr Redwood, you missed your shot.
Two guys go to art school. Both get their degrees at the end of it.
One continues in academia, teaching art in schools; the other goes out into the world and sometimes makes his millions. Education isn't exclusive of either.
It's about choice, sometimes cojones, desire and also about the ability to put what you learned into productive practice.
Regarding the throwaway jibe about pinup calendars: I suggest you dig a little bit and go discover who was behind some of the classics of the last fifty years; you'd be surprised. Or not, depending on how hard your carapace, or how profound that inability to see further than the end of your prejudice. We already enjoyed your reference to pornography; do pinup calendars such as Pirelli, Mintex, Belaco, Pentax et al. fall within the remit of your mindset on the matter? Of course, you may well be familiar with others more obscure, requiring specialist knowledge to discover them, where your contentions might actually be fact: I don't know those waters - I don't navigate them.
I really smiled at your reference to the guy in tweeds: you were absolutely accurate, but you missed the corduroy trousers,
Several decades ago I happened to find myself in London with time to kill, so I took myself to Hamilton’s Gallery where they were running a show of Mapplethorpe’s brother’s work. As I walked slowly from shot to shot, I became aware that I was being trailed a picture behind by the very man you described (didn’t notice a lunch box) who was giving a running commentary to a woman, explaining the photographs to her as they went along.
It wasn’t difficult to be distracted from the pictures, so I decided to listen in. It was delightfully educational: one shot, of a person standing in front of a white wall covered with very textured paper really made me struggle to supress the mirth. The fact that the wallpaper showed the texture of its fabrication was applauded and pointed out as a wonderful display of photographic pyrotechnics! As a professional photographer, the question would have been: how could you possibly avoid that texture in a side-light situation? I have no idea who the cat in cords was: dealer, boyfriend or ‘uncle’ but his credibility and that of his companion, if she bought into the spiel, lie forever in tatters in my memory.
No doubt, he might fit your definition of savant?
Rob C