The great novelists and great artists of today are lost in the noise. When history has thrown away the chaff they'll be visible - and people will be complaining about the low quality of their own contemporaries.
Tolstoy was famous in his day. As was Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Picasso, etc. Sure there were a few, like Van Gogh, who died before becoming recognized, but they were fractional exceptions.
Show me one great artist living today -- anyone who can compete with a Tolstoy or even a Hemingway. Below Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Franzen are mentioned, but I don't think anyone in their right mind would put them remotely at that level. You're waiting for history and there's no sign that you'll do anything but keep waiting.
You and I will never know. But I'm betting that the contemporary distractions are no more the cause of mediocrity than the historic ones were.
Indeed, I have reached a similar conclusion. For me, the brain is a huge pattern-matching machine, therefore it needs to have patterns to be able to match anything, that's where the knowledge comes in. In addition, the more "patterns" it has, the faster it works. And it can come up with new patterns (and infer their relationships) on its own.
I have noticed that many people that are perceived as "slow" or "dumb" are just unfamiliar with concepts, no matter how trivial they seem. So their brains have to work overtime to try to understand something that is "intuitive" for others - probably something everyone struggled with at some point of their lives, perhaps as children.
I wish I could have data to back this up, but I only have anecdotal evidence.
The amount of work it requires is trivial.
Cormac McCarthy was interviewed by Oprah, for god's sake.
Jonathan Franzen appeared on the cover of TIME magazine.
If someone wants to read any great novel, all they need to do is spend the fractional amount of time searching their memory for a lauded novelist and a corresponding work.
If someone wants more particularly to read a great novel by an author they aren't yet familiar with, all they need to do is five minutes of triage on the internet.
If you've got the notion floating around in your head that reading a great novel is a great thing, then locating one serves no difficulty, because you're very probably aware of the well-publicized awards - Pulitzer, National Book Award, Booker, etc.
Further, that person's very likely familiar at least partially with the canon that's been repeatedly shoved down every high-school to college educated Westerner's throat for the last fifty years.
There are lists upon lists upon lists of great novels out there both contemporary, classic, genre-based, contrarian and obscure. Just pick your flavor.
The organizational and review systems out there are better than ever.
Is there more out there? Absolutely. But it sure as hell doesn't qualify as noise. And it sure doesn't qualify as a valid excuse for not spending time with a great book.
I have a theory that intelligence is not so much about the knowledge of facts but about the relations between those facts (more about the edges than the nodes). Making distinctions and the opposite, creating abstractions, are where intelligence arises, and that happens when you're unplugged. It's an unconscious process, so it happens when you sleep, when you shower, when you stare out into space.
Where are the great novelists and great artists of today? I think we're not smart enough, not insightful enough, to write like that anymore. Tolstoy died a hundred years ago. Where is his replacement, when we have so many more people and the percentage with access to writing tools and publishing means is unprecedented in history?
I think they're out there; I think they're watching TV.