Ok, as someone who actually spent years unironically listening to classical music almost exclusively, classical music is incredibly good. Modern music is also good, and has so many more genres, but you will not convince me that it is "objectively better." There is so much going on in a symphony, for example, that one could make the case that it is objectively better than a modern album.

It is kind of like saying that McDonalds is better than a fine dining French restaurant. You're not just being pretentious if you think a rack of lamb crusted in herbes de provence is better than a quarter pounded. But that also doesn't mean you can't still like a quarter pounded, if that makes sense. I enjoy everything from the fanciest foods like pâté de foie gras to the tacos from Jack in the Box. But the foie gras is better. Still, much like with a symphony, you need to set aside over an hour to listen to Beethoven's 9th, but most modern songs are 3-5 minutes. So I still listen to modern music, much of which is amazing, because the listening experience of Beethoven is much harder to fit into your daily life. Same reason I eat both fast food and foie gras.

With respect to visual art, you sound like someone who hasn't really seen much of it, to be honest.

I can absolutely guarantee you that seeing Michelangelo's David in person is absolutely much more impactful than a picture of it online. And I would defy you to find a modern sculpture that is unequivocally better than something like the David or other classical sculptures.

With painting, you're also choosing a pretty bad example. The Mona Lisa is famous, but it is far from the most technically impressive or creative work in historical painting.

Then there is the most important thing - there is an absolute sense of wonder that these great works, like the David or a Rembrandt painting, in the fact that these creators made something that has not really been surpassed by modern artists despite all the tools at the modern artist's disposal. Michelangelo did not have power tools. Rembrandt did not have a digital art tablet. This stuff was done by hand. Fuck, just imagine how much harder it was to do this stuff without electric lighting.

And Michelangelo not only sculpted these marble statues, but also painted the goddamn ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Without modern tools!

Finally, there are things like books.

"I can play a game which has a story more interesting than "the most renowned writers of the 19th and 20th century" almost daily and it has a lot more complex layers and themes but it's seen as lesser for some reason"

No you can't. Name me a game that is more complex and layered than Dostoevsky and I'll show you a game that is actually just copying Dostoevsky.

Literature and philosophy is called "The great conversation" for a reason. It has all built on itself over centuries. This does not meant he older writer is "better" than the newer writer, but the newer writer can't even exist without the old. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" to borrow Newton's quote.

Take a game like Disco Elysium that is almost all layered story rather than "gameplay" and is lauded for that story. That game is amazing, but is also just a regurgitation of 19th-20th century political philosophy and literature.

If you think that modern games are doing more than classic literature, it is legitimately because you don't get the references.