The Scourge of Modern Portraits

People are exposed to portrait photography all the time now a days, from early class photos, to getting your drivers-license, to doing a shelf-shoot for your profile page. This blandness, this dip, this low-point is what you get when a medium explodes in saturation. I saw this in television, as things got blander to reach the widest audience. Television still has a lot of blandness, but people have realized that they don't have to conform to that, and the medium is rising out of that dip, and we're seeing some truly great work on TV now (even on broadcast TV). Portrait photography has become watered down and boring. We hate boring. There are endless portraits out there of people with fake smiles, standing stiffly in front of a blue background. Why would you want photos of you that say more about your biology then who you are as a person. It takes some work, but why would you be normal, when you can Be Art?