Everybody says this all the time, to such an extent that an article was written to express the contrary view

I'm also pretty sure that given a famous "highbrow" literature or art work, you could easily find plenty of respected critics who think it's shit, and vice versa for "lowbrow" works.

The article itself is an example of the same phenomenon!

"Philistines say these unreadable books are garbage, but sophisticates like me say they have great merit."

At least with writing, you have to have gone through the effort to churn out the words and invested the time and energy to put together a story. But expending effort on it alone doesn't make it good... "Literary" fiction tends to fall into this trap a lot, and leans hard towards overwrought character studies of really awful, boring people and their sordid little lives. Every time I see a pickle dish, I have PTSD flashbacks to junior year English and beating Ethan Frome to death...

Sure, except when it isn't. The opposite generalization contains no information either.

(Speaking of which, please don't post low-information rants to HN.)

I think it goes both ways. You have wannabees and genuine craftsmen who really put a lot of effort into their work. Sometimes you have to really look at the artist, their past, their state of mind, etc. Emotion is a powerful brush when wielded by a craftsman. To a novice of a persons work, it might look like shit stains on toilet paper but behind the scene is the process of creation, what inspired them is just as important. Think more blacksmith, less jerk with a guitar trying to pick up chicks. Sometimes the jerk with the guitar makes it big. Such is life.

I wonder if the more pertinent question might be: why are some people so seemingly afraid of random drips of paint?

(And while I'm not claiming to know your own views on the subject) I interestingly find this most commonly expressed by people who also happen to be deep believers in free-market-solves-everything. And one of the biggest complaints so many people have is the money aspect, whether it be how much actors or sports players are paid or, in this case, artists. Ostensibly, that by definition, pay in a free market would flux, that is, that there would be no baseline. But that seems to be the problem. They, often, tend to also complain about things like popular music. Yet, popular music is directly the result of driving to produce more of what the listener wants (as dictated by actual buying patterns, and not people say they want)(we could talk about influencing of fads and the priming of consumers, but why shouldn't that just as easily have its place in the market?). But in returning to remuneration, isn't it possibly that the exact fear expressed here the fear of the very core of free market enterprise, that there is no standard value, and that by definition, my value (which is, obviously, probably what I'm most immediately concerned with, as it determines my very ability to survive in the modern world) can fluctuate from positive to zero to, even, negative. So the desire seems to be to have the free market aspect, and what ever is seemingly being gained from it, which is whole other problem, but import into it some sort of universal standard base value that exists out there as some sort of Platonic ideal, therefore to know the 'value' of anything requires only a conversion from this universal base value to any specific real-world exchange, more or less. But, obviously, this is in direct opposition to the core of free markets. So, then, is it merely an expression of anxiety related to relativism?

Those arguing sometimes try to get around this by investing 'effort', that is, Caravaggio supposedly takes more effort than Pollock, say, to render a given painting, so therefore one is 'worth' more than the other. But, really, isn't this just the idea of a universal base value being snuck in under cover? After all, it does not depend on how much work is involved in anything, it only depends on what amount of value someone (and how many someones) is willing to offer in exchange for it. Indeed, isn't the desire always to spend less in development and deliver than theoretical competitors? Isn't that the core way in which the free market is supposed to deliver unto us everything we never knew we wanted?

The problem is that, fundamentally, art is probably much like the law, is probably fundamentally tautological. That is, what is art, and what is great art, more exactly, is that which which we say is art and that which we say is great art.

As you say, art is much like the law. Ethics and aesthetics. Is fear, then, at the breakdown of an aesthetic order so strange? The program of modern art seems to be to carry out in the aesthetic realm what in the moral realm is the equivalent of a radical libertinism, the transgression of every boundary, the dispersion of every universal bond. "Everything is permitted": was that not the great fear? The law too is only what we say the law is and those random drips of paint in which the viewer can see nothing connected to their notion of "beauty", can see something perhaps totally alien to their notion of "beauty", might put the flame a bit too close to that thin paper through which you can catch the glimpse of an abyss.

I would almost be tempted, more so, to say that it is the reverse, that they desire transgression. The thing of it is, to use Lacan's reversal of the the slightly-incorrect distillation of Dostoevsky by Sartre [that is: 'Without god, everything is permitted.'] which goes: 'Without god, nothing is permitted', transgression is only possible through a lack of permissiveness.