A museum culture tries to preserve the fine arts of Western civilization. Odds and ends, such as ragtime, jazz, African art, and even Picasso are accumulating in this category as the last practitioners die. Last, and definitely least, is the avant garde art produced by academics, grey-bearded hippies, chimpanzees, and other assorted weirdos. The only market for this junk is a bunch of wealthy New York neurotics bored with their shrinks, and the National Endowment for the Arts. It is difficult to understand why taxpayers, through the NEA, should subsidize what is mostly badly done pornography, when good stuff is available in adult bookstores and on the Internet.
Art is important.
That the decline of the fine arts has moved in step with the rise of technology tells us a lot. The monarchs and priesthoods of Europe patronized artists of great talent, partly for the sheer joy of doing it, and partly out of a wish to bedazzle the masses and keep them in awe of authority, both secular and religious. The art of that era is as much of a relic as the politics and religion. It was nice, but it is dead. This is the Orwellian era of scientific, Pavlovian brainwashing.