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The bad art simply hasn't survived
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Sadly, I must take issue with this. From Victorian pornography to Renaissance nationalist doggerrel (the Pope is a horse's a**, Spaniards are all b*****s, etc) there is
lots of bad art that has come to us 'through the ages'. The old "test of time" theory does not quite hold up, I'm afraid, given these and a whole host of other examples. . .
The only difference between bad art and good art that has survived is in the interested powers/people who want to preserve it. Publishing houses want to keep Dickens around because his stuff still sells (relatively) well and you don't have to cut out a slice of the profits to any pesky estate. Academics want to keep anti-Papal doggerrel around to study it, people of dubious taste and morality want to keep the Victorian porn about in order to. . .well. . .you get the picture (actually, I hope you do not).
There is no "gold standard" of historical transmission that can guarantee quality and worth in art -- it's all still just the market place.
Gone With the Wind continues to outsell the roughly contemporaneous
Ulysses, and while I enjoyed Margaret Mitchell's buccolic romp through the Old South (passing quickly over the text's racism and classism) I would not in a million years make any claim that it is a better book than anything produced by James Joyce!