In the Eyes, and Wallets, of the Beholder
I often puzzle over the chasm that exists between the quality of popular artistic success and intrinsic quality. Of course, intrinsic quality is a subjective thing, though you can somewhat rely on a consensus among appreciators of a particular art form to generalize what is good and what is lacking in some critical way.
To avoid contemporary controversy, I’ll cite past examples: I was a compulsive reader as a kid. I didn’t have a Pulitzer Prize winning critic sitting on my shoulder advising me on the artistic validity of what I was reading. I just had my own brain, my own taste and eye for pretense masquerading as art.
I could tell right away that Shakespeare had the whole thing knocked, so let’s put him aside. He can have coffee with Einstein and Michelangelo, and they can catch up on their golf games.
After that, things were more confused. I read a lot of James Michener, Leon Uris and Arthur Hailey. They were great plot designers and immensely popular writers of their time. As prose stylists, to use the technical literary term, they sucked. 
In more recent times, I’d place Michael Crichton and Dan Brown in the same category. Sell a lot of books and entertain people, good for them. They stink as writers. Writing defined as something more than a straight-ahead, wooden description of a story line, with minimal character development, no reflection of greater import, no effort to challenge the reader to glance into a thesaurus.
But to the intellectual cynics who declare that only schlock sells, I have two thoughts. What you call schlock is a lot harder to create than you think. The above cited writers are gifted craftsmen who’ve found the key to popular acceptance. If this was easy, most of us far poorer literary types would be far richer. 
Second, sometimes literary brilliance sells very well. Two of my favorite crime novels, “Presumed Innocent” and “Mystic River,” truly transcended the genre and were as beautifully written as any book regarded as great literature. They were also both huge sellers and major movies.
But the most convincing evidence that quality can occasionally will out, despite the mediocrity of the zeitgeist, is Steely Dan. Their greatest success came in the 1970’s, the darkest artistic age of the 20th century. A time of bad economics, bad hair, awful music, miserable architecture and leisure suits. In the midst of this dismal time, two musicians earned millions with a jazz rock fusion repertoire unequalled to this day, so far above the heads of eager buyers that no one even noticed.
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