What "state of the art" means in IT security today

It is intended to express that current technology is being used but this implicitly excludes visionary technology. Often the term is used to as a line of defense to show compliance with standards: "I protected the system according to the state of the art, it's not my fault that something happened." So far so good, but we still have a number of questions to answer. Is a firewall based on iptables just as state of the art as a Next Generation Firewall provided by a large manufacturer? Are passwords with eight characters in length state-of-the-art? Are passwords still state-of-the-art at all?

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