The “whole point of art” for most of human history has been to continue a tradition of craftsmanship, and innovation has its place but is certainly not the whole point. It wasn’t until the 20th-century that innovation became “the whole point” for the Modernists, whose views were not universally shared. Down the centuries, works of literature, music and cinema have regularly featured references to the artist’s forebears without being dubbed "inane" for it. (There certainly is a qualitative difference from comic-book movies, which are low culture, often by their creators' own admission, instead of high culture). And whether a person can properly "digest" works of art at that pace completely depends on the person; evidently many people can.