That actually was responsive to the previous discussion. And we disagree so much on the idea that artistic merit or accomplishment or whatever you want to labe

That actually was responsive to the previous discussion. And we disagree so much on the idea that artistic merit or accomplishment or whatever you want to label it is indexed wholly or even in large part by amount of people who view it that there’s not much to say except just that: I disagree. Which is not to say that I have some equally objective measure to offer you. I don’t. But then, I’m not the one who made claims about artistic accomplishment “by most measures” (whatever that even means). I simply provided an example of something that self-evidently certainly rivals “American cinema” as universally acknowledged to be profoundly artistically accomplished. Whatever the comment about dreck in every era actually proves, if you think the Renaissance was not the site of profound artistic accomplishment (hello, rediscovery of linear perspective; hello frescos; etc.) I don’t even know what to say. [Edited to add: if artistic accomplishment is just eyeball quantity, then it will increase linearly with the increase in global population and interconnectedness as technology improves. Reducing something like artistic accomplishment to such a simple function of population size serves as the best possible reductio of that position.]