A teacher once told us, "Everything has been done before - but not by you". Tell 50 people to make their own version of any story, and you'll get 50 new stories (though yeah, a bit of originality is great).

Also, artists need time to develop. Sturgeon's law isn't just for artists you know. Every artist knows that you generally have to create a lot of crap to get good. So when people give out about crap art, they're really just telling on themselves: "I don't create".

Finally, for fun, try comparing fossil fuel subsidies to artist subsidies some time. "But we need fossil fuel" - try going a week without any art; no music, no movies, no games.

We need art, too. We may not know what we need it for, but we evidently need it for something.

We've been making art for a really long time. We've been smearing colors onto surfaces for at least tens of thousands of years, and carving patterns into rocks and shells for at least hundreds of thousands of years.

Everywhere you find human communities, you find some kind of art. We must need it for something. If we didn't then it wouldn't be so ubiquitous.