And since we're apparently only dealing in absolutes - would we be in bigger trouble than we'd be in if no art, nowhere was kept for any amount of time?
physical art's problem is space. We literally can't hold everything. Go to any museum and see how there's probably another museum's worth of artifacts in the back, covered up, for various reasons.
Digital art's problem is saturation. You try to preserve everything withotu curation and you just get a huge mush to wade through. Ever try to sort out a game folder without relying on Steam? Imagine that 10,000 fold. You can have valuable art and spend a career as a digital archeaologist trying to derive the "best games" out of petabytes of crap.
>And since we're apparently only dealing in absolutes - would we be in bigger trouble than we'd be in if no art, nowhere was kept for any amount of time?
It's an interesting question. We'd be in a different situation, but I'm not sure if it'd be objectively better or worse. Without any circuses, the populace would turn to addressing the bread in their hands. This can cause sociatal reform or societal collapse.
> physical art's problem is space. We literally can't hold everything
And it gets more interesting when you consider that "everything" is a lot closer to literal than one would expect. What is "art" is extremely subjective. I could go to a store that sells old things from houses and find a vintage toilet or door and call it art; because I think it's cool looking. Someone else could find a dozen houses in my town and call them art because they're historic in some way. Everything drawn by someone's child is art. You can't keep "all art" because we literally _can't_ keep all art. There's too much of it
If art was preserved solely on the basis of whether its contemporaries thought it was worthwhile, we'd be in real trouble.