Is “NYPD Blue” art or just entertainment?

Return to this long standing issue of mine as to the difference between art and entertainment.  Literature that is artistic in its product whatever its intent presents itself as a self contained fictional sphere which can be found to be coherent and vivid when it deploys plot, imagery, characterization and those other elements of story. You know “Hamlet” is art because you care about penetrating Hamlet’s character as he resides in the very credible atmosphere of Denmark. Literature can be found in the canon of work from the Iliad to Thomas Mann that are assigned to students, recent works not yet judged to have met that standard, though I think Ishiguro is probably a worthy advocate who has not yet been anointed at a Cooperstown because anointing a member of the canon is a matter of critical consensus rather than even having won a Nobel Prize in literature, which was awarded to Ishiguru.. Some contestants, over time, fade in their grasp of having created an artful sphere of their own, and that is true with Steinbeck and O’Hara. We can think of those two and others as falling just short of making literature however commendable were their efforts. The question is what are the qualities of the literature itself that commend a work to be considered literature rather than an entertainment which provides a passtime for engaging a reverie, like most westerns or mysteries, these using the devices of literature but not accomplished enough for a reader to become resident in its work. Critics discuss whether some writers have come close but not quite there, as is the case with Conan Doyle or Mrs. Gaitskill, honorable attempts at literature, and even praise Agatha Christie for her plotting while admitting weaknesses in characterization that limit a reader’s full emotional and intellectual involvement. My own purpose is to find the qualities that make a work literature or not rather than think approbation a matter of taste or a reflection from outside the work, such as the social background of the reader that make a reader like rural or urban settings. Literature is to be treated as an objective matter rather than a matter of taste, the experience of art an exquisite accomplishment of the spirit rather than a bauble to be put in a china shop so as to remind people of what is already familiar.