Art as a race to the bottom

There’s a really common framing that people defending social media/slop content in general use, which is that “This is people always react to new media”, usually accompanied by some sort of anecdote or newspaper headline stating how the youths are being corrupted by those newfangled books, about how penny fiction is ruining peoples’ ability to understand Shakespeare.

If we take this theory to it’s natural conclusion, it is basically saying that it’s unfair to treat any art as ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any other art, Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, ‘Man is the measure of all things’ etc etc. But this is feels like a bad theory as it doesn’t allow us to make any predictions about Art, post hoc or propter hoc. If all perspectives are equally valid, then what’s the point of any discourse about art? We just put forward our own perspective with an almost mawkish defence of ‘This is what I think please don’t hate more for it’?.