Art at best is critique, and as with the street art, art finished behind closed walls once it got bankable, and for rap, punk, comics, even worse emasculated.
And NY books forget all these country like France where like in the USSR, IIIrd Reich, mussolinian Italy there are still a minister of the Culture to tell the people what is the right Culture for them. To be an artist, don't piss the government else you lose funding and possibility to expose/sing/dance/perform.
And modern website design, is looking like the Nazi propaganda with their always clean looking smiling workers thinking of a brighter future shaped in the form of the ideal society.
It is creepy how we can see what was wrong in the past but suffer short sight.
Either way, I disagree. It's inappropriate to impose a single continuum of quality onto all art.
Else, art would be encrusted with either a stochastic form, or a fixed point that would never be evolving.
Art being related to craftsman like building where technique are evolving I see nothing shocking in my assertion. Art is like progress in craftsmanship it always questions the past best practices.
Hence, coding is pure Art!
That's a very generous definition of "critique". I hung a little bit of cloth from Guatemala on my wall. Is that a critique of centuries of textiles?
I suppose we can make a distinction between fine arts and decorative arts. I find that boundary line very difficult to draw.