Archaic or Avant Garde

What is it to paint something in oil these days, with a live model sitting. Or to use one's imagination and paint upon a canvas that will be only one of a kind. We live in a digital age. Copies can be made through pictures, etc. and posted on the web or reproductions made, but the original is the original. It seems very archaic and out of date to paint in oil paints. Why not simply use digital photography, photoshop, and manipulate images?
There is something personal, I find, when I paint. I become the camera or lens through which the image is understood. How I process, experience and love that which I see is then processed even further though my limited abilities and limited material. The limitations of what it is to be a mortal are expressed even further in our limitations of expression.
With the availability of technology changing the way we see images, with so many people creating images and modifying images to post, publish and promote; might it be the avant garde of art to actually paint an image. To create a one of a kind work, with the visible strokes of the brush seen on the canvas, the human connection leading to the subject and the experience of the two - artist and subject- together makes for perhaps the ultimate edge of art within our human journey.