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Your first point is good and sounds reasonable.
Your second point is not clear to me. What is it that caused artists in the modern era to rebel against the tastes of their patrons? Why is it that these rebellious artists, rather than toiling in obscurity, actually became commercial successes with ample patronage?
It seems to me that the only explanation must be that they are not, in fact, rebelling against the tastes of their patrons, and it is actually the taste of the patrons that has changed. This is kind of kicking the can down the road, because we can ask why the taste of patrons changed in the first place - but I'm comfortable saying that peoples' tastes change over time for some exogenous reasons, and sometimes they change for the worse.
This would have been my hypothesis too if not for two things:
1: There are modern architects and artists, particularly very popular and in-demand ones with the most power to set taste, who actually seem to fail to give the client what they want. See Eisenman's House VI again as an example - he certainly felt comfortable depriving the client of much of what they found important. Again, there's also this comment from an architect under Scott's post on the traditional/modern divide in aesthetics, stating that architects do have some power to impose taste due to the fact that they possess skills the client needs, and that the client does not dictate everything. In Tom Wolfe's book on modern architecture, he notes "I once saw the owners of such a place driven to the edge of sensory deprivation by the whiteness & lightness & leanness & cleanness & bareness & spareness of it all. They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out."
2: Most people, including the upper class who have the power and financial wherewithal to commission these buildings, seem to prefer the style of traditional buildings as opposed to modern ones. See the studies linked in Part 1 of my original post, as well as the price premiums that traditional housing commands despite apparently similar construction costs (in part 3 of my original post); it doesn't seem to be the case that this proliferation of modern architecture is primarily a bottom-up, demand-driven phenomenon.
It's a copout, but I don't have a definitive answer for you as to why the public and the art world shifted so heavily out of phase, and how this situation continues to propagate itself. The bulk of my post tries to answer the question of what's happened, why there is such a persistent bifurcation between what is actually being produced and people's stated preferences, and I can't really come to a firm conclusion. I can only guess it's partly down to the maintenance of a strict academic/architectural hegemony and partly down to the influence of city-planning councils which are a nonrepresentative and generally trained group of people that have the power to approve or veto developments. Perhaps there's also some fashionability in there - academic opinion is high status and has the ability to dictate the choices of the public, not just the other way around, and once academic consensus regarding modern art was established it caused some segment of the elite to be willing to forfeit designs they personally enjoy for an attempt at signalling status. For some people, getting a house built by Frank Gehry in what is perceived as forward-thinking styling is more important than actually living somewhere they would most enjoy, and there are also many patrons like governmental institutions who don't actually live in the buildings they commission and may not actually like them but want to project an air of modernity, which isn't inherent to the style but is rather an aesthetic signal academics created once they deemed it the New Style, fit for the Age of Machine. In other words, academics dictate demand just as much as they respond to it.
There's a very simple solution that I'm honestly surprised no one has voiced. I confess I have neither the knowledge nor rhetoric to conclusively prove this theorem beyond my passionate and amateur interest in house design and architecture, but it basically boils down thusly;
Architecture is heavily invested in Academics. Academics are very political. Therefor, it's reasonable to assume that Architecture is also heavily political and driven by politics.
When you trace 'Modern'(I use capital M for a reason) Architecture back to the Bauhaus movement and the entire reasoning behind it, I feel it becomes very obvious.
Then again, I am clearly biased, as I absolutely loathe Bauhaus and nearly everything it's influenced.
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Two possibilities come to mind for a shift in power towards artists:
Artistic defectors have been shunned for hundreds of years. Off the top of my head, the Vienna Secession and the Exhibit of Rejects both consisted of artists with heterodox styles that couldn't find a place in the academy and had to strike out on their own.
Those are 1897 and 1863. Going purely by the links provided, the Vienna case is angry modernists splitting off from what they considered to be a defunct institution; the Paris case was similar and they got a special exhibit put on for them by the emperor.
Especially in Vienna, this doesn’t look like the academy shunning defectors so much as defectors coordinating to shun the traditional academy. Being less tolerant, they won and took over.
The emperor himself didn't like any of their works and only acquiesced to let them be exhibited during the Paris Salon over the objections of the Salon's jury (rather different from putting on a special exhibit for them) due to the weight of public opinion.
It's a case of defectors being told they have no place in the academy, and leaving to start their own thing. Same as it ever was.
You are avoiding the question of why this is no longer an option. How much harder can defectors be shunned than when they had to leave the mainstream artistic edifice entirely to follow their vision?
I might be being influenced by hindsight here, but this seems like thinking that e.g. the anti-Covid-lockdown protests and the anti white-on-black police brutality protests were the same, just because the outward forms look similar. The genuinely disapproved-of Covid protests were punished with huge (10,000gbp in the UK) fines while the BLM protests had open sympathisers in high positions.
My model is that if your movement is genuinely shunned, it disappears. People who leave to start their own thing and follow their vision are getting backing from somewhere. Or to put it another way, if you see a little guy speaking truth to power, he's already on the way up; if he weren't, he'd be silent. You know someone's a real defector because people laugh at them, they can't get commissions, and anyone who tries to publish them follows the same path.
It disappears if everyone shuns it, sometimes. Sometimes you become Vincent van Gough, shunned during your life and a darling afterwards. If you're only shunned by the academy, though, you can still get ahead by striking out for yourself - most people are not as doctrinaire as old academic artists, and wealthy patrons are free to fund the things they like even if the professors tut-tut at them.
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