[Faile]

It's quite hard to jump into such a well developed discussion, so I'll just rattle off a few thoughts of mine:

Art / Audience - Does the work of the artist make the work great, or does the appreciation of the audience? Can the artist alone find enough fulfillment from the act of creation, or are artists driven by a desire to be noticed? We can talk about artists challenging an audience, but few works are so reviled that they go unappreciated, and even those that are reviled form a legacy.
Thus is the true objective of the artist to forge a legacy - to not be forgotten?

Cheap art- by which I mean art that makes money from an audience in the bucketloads and is instantly forgotten (most usually found within the worlds of popular music) is not normally reasoned to be creative, yet the processes of creation would have been the same. Is the worth therefore dictated by vision of purpose? Is art that is created for all to share for free, of a greater value than that design to earn?
That said, is all popular work simply popular becuase it's copied from a greater source?

All of the above, of course, conveniently skips such things as enjoyment, but certainly, thinking of my own experiences in the world of music, if you can't connect with an audience, the work is worthless. You need to find common ground, even if that ground is on the fringes...