You seem to be conflating craftmanship and artistic merit. They are not the same thing. While it is perfectly valid to care only about craftsmanship, and many people do feel that way, that isn't a universal opinion. It is also an opinion that makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about many modern artists for whom craftsmanship simply wasn't the point of their work.
I don't agree that I'm conflating the two. Actually, some of the things I've seen that had the most artistic merit were awful things made by truly incompetent people who didn't care they were incompetent. They still had artistic merit because unless you're actually bad, it takes special effort to make something really terrible. I guess you could say that artistic merit increases when you move away from the sludge of mediocrity, while craftsmanship exists only in one direction.
>It is also an opinion that makes it difficult to have a meaningful conversation about many modern artists for whom craftsmanship simply wasn't the point of their work.
Do you mean that it makes it difficult, or do you mean that those artists don't come out looking good? Because I'm fine with the latter.
