So my good friend Brad caused a ruckus with this post. There is a clear divide between modernist/contemporary tastes and...well...everyone else. There's a lot of bad theory about how or why this happened, but I think one of the most clarifying things I ever read was the following quote by French painter Gauguin. "The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public." Art became introspective and niche exactly at the time art became democratized. Before the late 19th C., artists couldn't dictated subject matter. They didn't have the freedom to. Art, whether painting, music or the written word, prior to the modern era, was always ensconced in the larger culture. All the patrons of the past, whether they were the king, a cardinal or a robber baron, existed in a matrix of religion and culture and tradition, that they couldn't ignore. So all the art that they patronized had to fit within that framework and served that culture. With the rapid democratization of society, art could be patronized by vastly different groups of people, completely unconnected from that culture. It allowed the artist to explore niches that the larger culture would not. The professional class in days past used to be selected out of a hereditary elite that had allegiance to certain traditions, expectations, crowns, faiths, nationalities, but not anymore, now they are more or less self-selected and move through a system that reinforces those tastes. Certain people used the new freedom to move into positions of influence in the culture. Over the 20th C. those self-selected elites took over the institutions that governed tastes, whether publishing houses, academies, museums or professional organizations. In a way, the institutions built for God, King and Country became the province of an entire generation of niche specialists. I explained this to a friend, and he said, so you mean that intellectuals are just obsessive otakus? And I had to say, well...yeah, basically. There's a reason we have terms like "art film" or "oscar bait" we know intrinsically that the tastes of certain in-groups are not meant for the larger audience. Modernism, through both the advent of mass media and the democratization of society, happened to hit right when certain ideas became obsessions of a cultural cohort who were uniquely positioned to take advantage of the new freedom and access to established institutional power. Those early groups of modernists took the mantle of arbiting tastes, assuming they had risen to those positions organically, rather than just being the firstfruits of a growing free society, and expected that their tastes would be emulated, accepted and appreciated. They were for a while, but now that power is crumbling. They thought they were a new vanguard, rather than just a new clique that was still playing with the toys of the old regime. But now we have moved past the need of arbitration from institution or authorities. The work of democratization and freedom has continued, creating new media and institutions that don't need elites to dictate tastes. Books like "The Great Gatsby" are hallmarks of a niche group, or, to put it in a more accurate contempeorary term, a fandom, that just happened to come along right when college English depts. became open to more than just the sons of Lords and nobles. The same happened in the visual arts, and while I am a big fan of a lot of the early modernists in literature and the visual arts, it's clear, this is just a niche fandom and not something that really serves the larger culture. I don't know if we are ever going to have the kind of unified culture we took for granted. I suspect it may all be niche subcultures from here on out, and that has a lot of implications. But, though I personally like Gatsby and modern art, I no longer believe that it represents anything more than the particularly cultural obsessions of a particular culture at a particular time. If there is a higher, more universal aesthetic culture that works for all humankind, I can't even begin to say what that would look like going forward. I find the reactionism of the Tradcons, with their obsession of academic paintings of 19th C. painters' mistresses in classical garb to be uninspired, frankly, but it's certainly no worse than where we wound up.