Alright, listen up young’uns. What’s going on here? Nowadays it seems like everyone is hooked up to the internet and making some kinda art or what have ya. Your neighbor is painting pictures on Instagram, your son is in a rock band on SoundCloud, and even your dog is on Tik Tok doing that renegade dance. This can’t be good, can it?

Well, the answer to whether this is a ‘good’ thing is actually quite complicated, and I’m not gonna sit here and tell you what to think. Instead, I’m gonna pull the classic philosopher’s dodge on ya; I won’t tell you what’s true, but I will tell you that if one thing is true, a whole bunch of other things must also be true with it.

On the face of it, the incredible ease with which one can create and share art and media of all kinds is a great boon to the arts. This is the metaphorical ‘spring of a thousand flowers’, where everyone is sharing their own perspectives and ideas, their creations blooming like flowers in an endless meadow. And it doesn’t stop there. One of the best things about this is that a lot of voices that were traditionally shut down are now being heard. Where before it was only the rich that could afford to sit around all day and draw pictures or compose songs, now virtually everyone has at least a little time to mess around with a melody if they want to. This means a lot of women, people of color, and other marginalized voices are being empowered and finally heard.

Here’s the thing though - and here I’m gonna be a little harsh - most of the art created today is stunningly mediocre. Search #art on Instagram and you’ll see exactly what I mean. And who hasn’t been to a show and quickly realized that the band in question is essentially just a Led Zeppelin cover band without the courage to actually play some Led Zep? It turns out that a lot of the things people think are new and worth saying have actually been said before, and said better. This isn’t really a knock on anyone; new ideas are hard to come by, especially nowadays when billions of people are all trying to think of a new thing every day.

So what makes art good? If you’ll take a moment to join me in a little time travel, let’s survey the great artists of the past, and we’ll find that they all fit into one of two categories. They have either (a) incomparable mastery of a style or form; or (b) a radically new approach to their medium. In music, Mozart is an example of the former, while Stravinsky is an example of the latter. In visual arts, you might have Michelangelo falling under (a), while Picasso falls into the (b) category. Of course there’s some overlap; no one attains mastery without experimenting, and no one experiments successfully without a firm foundation.