The quality of visual art (paintings and sculptures, as an example) has diminished. No one can negate that fact.
Canned shit is being treated like a masterpiece.
It is because the things that defined the value given to a piece, have shifted from the visual beauty said piece has and the effort that was done to achieve said beauty, to the meaning of the art piece, the backstory.
The value given to art was always based on visual beauty. The old greeks admired the human form, and tried to represent it perfectly. The famous paintings and sculptures that were done during the middle ages and the renaisance where of extremely good quality, being pleasant to the eye. The ability to depict reality as closely as posible was praised.
Even to someone that has not had interaction with the culture in which the pieces done following universal standards of beauty, the piece retains value, as it is based on visual aesthetics.
Now, however, it's based on the story, the meaning that the piece has. One great example is "the shoes on the danube". It has been praised as a great masterpiece. The sculpture itself is a collection of shoes sticked to the ground, in front of a river. Each pair of shoes is supposed to represent a victim of the nazis. To a person that doesn't know the context, it is merely a collection of shoes. The viewer has to know the story behind the piece to understand why its valuable. If the message, meaning, or story of the piece is not known, the viewer will see it as fucking trash.
If the pieces done following the rules I stated in the paragraph above, are presented to an allienated individual, it will certainly not be able to spot the source of praise.
That is why the standards have fallen so low, because meaning is praised more than beauty. That is why trash like an untouched canvas is sold by millions of dollars.
It gets even worse when the context is not shown. How can you spot the diference between a masterpiece and a pool of vomit? you can't. Only if you are told that one of those two identical pools of vomit is a thoughtful representation of human nature towards its own existance, and specifically told which one is it, you will be a ble to spot it. It holds no value of itself, the value is given by the viewer.
The conception that beauty is subjetive has also help to sink the quality of art in general. The idea that beauty is not a shared perception between every human, but a fluid concept that is aplied by the mind over an object, and that it changes depending on the person. It has been proved wrong, but that it has doesn't mean that it will stop being pushed by every form of media.
In short, if the context of a piece is striped from it, and then it holds no value, it had no value to start with.
