When everyone is always performing a certain act, that act will be regarded as banal, and any outcome of that act will be regarded as noise, pollution, sewerage, trash, of negative value.

No one in prior eras is likely ever to have imagined the supernumerousness of artists and artworks that our era, through technology and ecopolitics, has inflicted on humankind.

No art currently holds authentic cultural value in the developed world. Pieces and bodies of art hold personal value to their makers, functional value to their communities, and financial value to their investors. No art holds cultural value to us all, or even to a majority of us.

(Cinema, television, and music just asked, “What are we, chopped liver?” This screed must be referring not to entertainment, but to fine art, maybe also to writing.)

We can and often do appropriate the value of fine artworks to ourselves individually and institutionally. We derive inspiration, encouragement, affirmation, prestige, and moral reinforcement from artworks produced outside ourselves and our communities. We sometimes think of the fine art we admire in this way as “My Art” the way we build playlists of “My Music,” and collections of “My TV Shows” and “My Movies.”

But, while in the entertainments of music, television, and cinema the artworks have been carefully crafted to apply to broad audiences, cultural resonance having been carefully planned and executed as the core concern because of its direct translation into profits for their production companies, in fine art it is presumed that cultural resonance is not planned.

The emergence of cultural resonance in the fine arts amounts to discovery, and its value can be presumed to be greater than that of entertainment because that discovered value is revelatory, challenging, visionary, transformative, and, in its rarest and greatest manifestations, consequential.