The whole idea of "artistic value" is vague, subjective, class-bound, culturally contingent, and notoriously easy to manipulate. It protects the famous, the canonical, the university-approved, the politely transgressive, the books with blurbs and pedigrees and respectable defenders.
But it does not protect cheap paperbacks, exploitation novels, underground comix, anonymous erotica, obscure zines, fanfiction, pulp horror, badly written shock fiction, or the work of people too poor, strange, stigmatized, or low-status to have critics rushing to declare them Important. It is worth pointing out that marginalized sexualities and subcultures have often only been able to speak through these low-status, disreputable forms.
The right to express yourself should not depend on whether your prose is elegant or meaningful in the eyes of a judge or jury. If a human made it, then it is meaningful to them, and that is enough to give it intrinsic value.
I do not defend ugly, stupid, tasteless, or exploitative books because I think they are somehow secretly noble. I defend them because freedom that only covers the respectable is a fraud.
If a book must audition for its right to exist by proving its cultural worth to authorities, then liberty has already been replaced with permission.
