I would say that your definition of artistic merit disagrees with what people in the art world use (both artists and people who appreciate art), and is way more aligned with the criteria the patent office and the copyright law use.

That's to say, your definition of artistic is very close to "patentable or copyrightable" (originality and novelty are required, emotional response isn't).

So you're not talking about art at all. What's important to you is not what makes art art.

The question to ask with art is a simple one: when people saw it, did it make them feel or think differently are the moment? And did it make them feel differently from the way other art pieces did?

You can't understand art without understanding the audience, because art is made for the audience — even if the audience is the artist themselves. You can't examine art in itself, just like you can't examine a mechanical tool in itself, without asking why it was made, what it was made for, and whether it was good in doing that.

You can't look at a saw and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms objects it's applied to (and what materials the saw was meant for). You need to tell a wood saw apart from a hack saw, and you need to know whether it actually could cut wood well to talk about the saw's merits.

A wood saw isn't bad if it doesn't cut metal. And if it cut a million trees down, it is a good saw beyond doubt.

You can't look at art and discuss its merits without understanding how it transforms people it's shown to (and what audience the art was meant for). You need to tell early 20th century suprematist art apart from art made today, and you need to know whether it actually could make people in early 20th century feel and think differently in response to it to talk about the art's merits.

An early 20th century suprematist artwork (like the Black Square) isn't bad if it doesn't cut it in today's artistic landscape. And if it changed the way a million artists thought and felt about art itself (which it did), it is good art beyond doubt.

The recommendation others had of taking an art history class is a solid one. It really widened my perspective when I took it, and I think it'll do the same for you.

PS: the same criteria apply to mathematics, which is art with a particular audience in mind.

Anyone can prove the Pythagorean theorem, and many have rediscovered it. It would be asinine to say it has no mathematical merit, or that Pythagoras wasn't a great mathematician.

Same goes for many other results. Calculus is common knowledge — and even in its time in was independently developed by both Leibniz and Newton.

The fact that any freshman knows to compute an antiderivative to find the area under the curve doesn't take away from magnificence of Leibniz and Newton doing the same.

But you'd have no idea what's so important about Calculus if that was all you knew about it - which, sadly, is how it's taught, and which is why people have no appreciation of neither mathematics, nor art.

Only learning about Calculus in a wider historical and mathematical context would enable you to do that.

You'd need to know how mathematics was before calculus, what compelled people to develop it, how it affected mathematicians, what kind of mathematics came into existence because of it, and ultimately, how it changed the world.

You need to know about which problems the scientific society was facing at the time, what question was Calculus an answer to, what the objections were at the time (and there were many - it was seen as heresy! Infinitesimals were whacky!), and why it was accepted in spite of them.

And once you do, you will see the simple integral sign differently than just a fancy way to write the letter S (which, by the way, it is: S for "sum", d for "difference", and the integral is, literally, a sum of differences multiplied by varying weights).

Same goes for art.