This is a huge question with dozens of answers, but I think the shortest, most concise one is this: culture has emphasized novelty over quality. No one cares if

This is a huge question with dozens of answers, but I think the shortest, most concise one is this: culture has emphasized novelty over quality. No one cares if you can demonstrate skill, unless it's in doing something new. Any list of celebrated architects and artists from the 1950s on will be comprised almost entirely of people that did something shocking or novel. There are many reasons as to why this happened, ranging from photography making it easy to create realistic images, to corporations having an interest in forced obsolescence. The way past this, I think, will basically come down to two things: 1. Respecting craftsmanship, which is ultimately about quality and reaching certain standards rather than being novel 2. Becoming comfortable with abundance and not basing value on scarcity. As in, we can all have beautiful things and we don't need to use rarity to determine if something is "artistically important." This has been the path of the art market (hence the huge price tags) and more recently NFTs, which to me are just a huge step in the wrong direction