Is it necessary for art to maintain an individual voice/identity when it is merged with bigger culture?

Note: I was going to start a new blog and post these there for my teacher's easy access, since this is technically for my Contemporary Art History journal... but I got lazy with the set up process, so I'm shoving them here. My opinions and responses to these questions given what I've been reading as well as what I will be reading probably reflect my ignorance more than my intellect. Consider that your warning from here on out.

Personally, I don’t think the question is of about necessity but about if it actually matters if art maintains its original individual voice and identity. One could be overly defensive about art being this holy relic of the human race that should not be a commercial product as Ad Reinhardt, implying that procreating even images from popular media isn’t original. And yet we have an art movement that reflects popular culture during the 1950s, a movement that has been parodied by popular media it was using. Warhol’s multiple images in colorful squares have been seen in cartoons like Family Guy; Lichtenstein’s blown-up newspaper comic styles can now be downloaded as a filter tool for any digital image editing program; even religion isn’t immune to popular culture now that things like Muslim head scarves are being made fashionable. Given enough time, every image will be confused like the Santa nailed to the cross in the Tokyo department store Walter Anderson mentioned in his introduction to The Truth About Truth.

Given all this, does it really matter if art has an original voice? Art took images from popular media, and popular media took those artistic images into their own shows. As a reference to popular culture for their own social commentary on the matter? Probably, but it depends on the context of the situation. Eventually, nobody will care or even know that one of the photographs in the credit roll of the movie Lilo & Stitch is a parody of the thanksgiving painting by Norman Rockwell. There’s really no point for art to stand out and maintain an identity of its own since it will always be procreated into something else.