Art can be whatever you like. The forefront, which is what you'd be expected to be looking at in a graduate program, isn't. It's the forefront, the leading edge, by definition different from what people were doing 80 years ago.
You can have a great deal of enjoyment discovering Euclid. You will not, however, be granted a graduate degree in mathematics for re-doing The Elements.
False analogy equating art with maths, but then I can't imagine doing maths for fun.
My stance on art "training" couldn't be more different to yours, and I quote myself:
"In all my career, not one client asked to see qualifications other then my portfolio (we didn't call 'em books in those days).
I think a long art education is fine if you want to be a historian, a talker and not a doer. What I think art education should be about is NOT mind-setting, but totally about practical skill and technique. Knowledge of your predecessors should be taken as granted, and part of what led you into an interest in art or whatever you call what you do. Neither you (nor the State) should be spending money for you to do what you can do mostly for free in any library.
I have long held the notion that people should never allow their own identity to become subsumed into anyone else's ideal. That's why I think all this critique stuff so dangerous, even when people think they look for it as nothing more than part of a game they are playing. Be very careful: if you allow anyone to fuck with your head, that's how it remains."
In effect, and bearing in mind that I was responding (above) to something other than your post, I think the sentiment still largely holds. But then my position is not yours, and I find my belief (interest?) centres around what's inside rather than what
should be inside, or perhaps what I could be trying to force inside so that it comes back out as something not quite me.
Indeed, as you wrote, art can be whatever you like. Perhaps the confusion lies in your/my definitions of forefront. You seem to be thinking in terms of new and/or different, whereas I think more in the direction of "forefront" implying the being very good at,
and successful, in whichever discipline one has espoused.
Cutting-edge was a term stock libraries used to love, and claim for themselves; mainly, it meant really stiff but technically brilliant work, and as far from representing any fresh line of thought as could be. It became popular with the advent of digital: you get the snap - canoes going over Niagara. Or even up Niagara. Mindless pyrotechnics.
I've seen enough "new" stuff to be totally disabused of the merit of most of what I have seen.
Rob