I have a working hypothesis that all of the best (or, at least, most famous) artists in history actually worked this way: they first became a "machine" with well-honed skills, and preferences slowly beaten into shape over decades of experience, into which high concepts could be fed and art would emerge—and then fed in the best of their current culture at the time. Shakespeare, for example, or Bach.

If you take an average journeyman artist and try to "plug and chug" culture, you get, well, pop. But if you take a master, you get classics. (And I do mean to imply the converse: if you give a master an input that isn't popular culture, the result likely won't be a classic—in the way that Star Wars or Dark Side of the Moon is classic. Instead, people will refer to it as a "masterpiece", like Lolita or, lately, Inception.)

The main difference between the two types, is that masterpieces just sit there and accrue attention, while classics actually melt back into the culture that spawned them, inviting parody and pastiche to such a point that it could be said they have invented a genre (ahem, Lord of the Rings.) It is the latter that will "stick" to culture hundreds of years hence, while the former will be relegated to scholars and textbooks.