I think that the photo art gallery is a misnomer that should be changed. It should be changed to Image Manipulation or some such thing.
Art is too broad a concept. All good photo images are artistic in my opinion. Take this recent image “Ribbons” by @Anil_Rao. It is clearly a “Fine Art” image and clearly belongs in Landscape:
https://community.naturephotographers.network/t/ribbons/3885
As previously commented, the degree of manipulation to which an image is applied can be argued. But to call it Photo Art is clearly wrong in my opinion.
Personally I think that that the degree of manipulation that is acceptable before it becomes labeled as ‘Manipulated’ is a moving target that can only be temporarily defined. Another words, it will changed with time as the medium changes. I think Lon writes some good points about current boundaries of when an image is over processed.
I get the feeling that this Photo Art is a pet peeve of Kathy. I, too, have a pet peeve that relates to this. It has to do with the argument “I rendered the image this way because that’s how I saw it”. This opens a Pandora’s Box in that anything can be seen every way possible and cannot be critiqued because it becomes a personal view. Another words, everything is art because art is in the eye of the beholder. Evaluation and even appreciation becomes meaningless. Several months ago I reported a really heavily saturated image to the landscape moderators, that it should be moved to the Art Gallery. It was decided that it was his vision that it should look that way and was within the boundaries of landscape. Well, every good landscape image has vision but not every image shot “the way I see it” is a good image. It has become customary now for image makers who fail with a specific image to not learn about it’s deficiency by dismissing the critique as “it’s my vision”. This whole previsualization thing that is supposed to raise a photographer to another level (because art is an abstraction) has usually had the opposite effect. But again, it’s due that elusive notion - what is art?