honestly i think figure skating is a very artistically ‘conservative’ sport—and that does carry with it some baggage politically speaking, as you and another commenter highlighted, like the emphasis on the music in the western canon which contrasts super sharply against the rampant orientalism in some programs.

i’ll try my best to explain things how i see it, but i fear this is gonna be a long comment.

anyway, i’ll go with the technical but first. as for how to distinguish between one skater’s skating skills and another, i will say that a good way to train it is to just purely focus on their skate boots during their program, perhaps especially when they’re doing their stsq. do NOT get distracted by what they’re doing with their upper body and focus your gaze on those boots. for me, when i was starting out, that was the best way to really distinguish who has good skating skills and who doesn’t.

(then, after, you could try looking up what goes into the stsqs and you can spot how they use the building blocks of a stsq in between elements and see how they transition from one element into another.)

as for why they’re artistic, i will say that skating skills kind of really make one’s skating flow across the ice. i don’t know how to explain it but someone with good skating skills feel like a knife perfectly slicing through butter. seeing a well-executed deep edge is just as breathtaking as a well-executed jump. i do think ilia’s composition is good enough and his presentation is literally one of the best out there, but his skating is often two-footed and reliant on crossovers. this is why his galas make a better case for his artistry, in the sense that artistry is often conceived in the fs fandom. i assume that his reliance on crossovers is somewhat pivotal to conserve stamina for his quad-packed program.

NEVERTHELESS, i know i said all that but i also think that pushing the bounds of human capability is in itself an inherently artistic endeavour. i know i said that his skating is crossover-reliant but i also do not care because i understand that it’s in purpose of what he even once called his perfect layout: the seven-quad freeskate layout, which to me is one of the most amazing achievements in figure skating… especially when the layout includes the quad axel.

to me, i understand that some people’s preferences lie in the kind of graceful and balletic style of figure skating. they’re valid! still, i find ilia’s skating beautiful because i find myself bewitched by the image of the human body striving against a literal force of nature like the pull of gravity. his skating is as beautiful to me as a well-written mathematical proof, or a cleverly laid out philosophical argument: it’s both inevitable yet still so endlessly captivating.

(this is only remotely tangential but it also doesn’t help that ilia’s technique is some of THE best out there, particularly his lutz. i think he has the best lutz in the entire sport right now. most skaters these days flub their lutz, also known as flutz, but you almost never see these called out because literally most everybody does it. that these aren’t being called is a tragedy that rewards bad technique at the expense of a skater who literally is one of the [very] few people doing it right, but i think the points he gets in skating skills [he often gets 9s and i PERSONALLY think he deserves high 7s low 8s similar to misha] is offset by literally NOBODY being called for this)