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.
