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This is an interesting perspective and I thank you for it. That said, to follow your academia comparison, there are academic physicists and there are engineers. A lot of what us plebs want are the kind of things we get from the engineers of art. And very few people want engineers to design inefficient and difficult to use appliances because they might have internals that are fascinating to other engineers. It would make a lot of people really resentful if they had to buy vacuum cleaners and dish washers from the 90s because modern engineers were obsessed with putting pointless voids in the new ones and held in contempt anyone who demanded functionality, which I think is actually what is analogous to beauty here. Novelty is also important and I think the beauty/functionality crowd underrates it but there is also something underserved.
If you go to your random local downtown art scene or art galleries in a resort town you can find lots of beautiful landscape paintings. It's not that the sort of technically proficient but not novel 'engineer' art isn't being done it's just not high status and not advanced by big time museums and institutions. Look at paintings in the 4-7k range in online marketplaces, there's lots of people still doing beautiful representational art.
A fair point, but I also think there are some other factors playing into the dynamic. Perhaps it's the belief that these different types of art have their places and more and more on the plebian to art snob spectrum the art snobs have been pushing their preferences onto the plebians. Like when governments pay huge fees for things like the $10 million MLK sculture. New art meant to be transgressive and sense shocking has it's place, but it often feels like we're the both the butt of the joke and footing the bill for it. Where is all the recent big stuff with mass appeal? The best I can think of is graffiti art type stuff which I enjoy around Chicago.
Was there a time in history when the art that was championed by elites was also popular with the masses? I genuinely don't know. Renaissance artists never had the chance for economic reasons. Picasso and Monet were successful in their time but were they successful among non-art snobs of their time? Was there some period where the mass public and the art establishment agreed or has the mass public just accepted the past judgement of art establishments from centuries ago because old things are classy.
I don't think the issue with the MLK sculpture is that it's meant to be transgressive or groundbreaking. It's Martin and Coretta embracing, it has a straightforward meaning. The artists just did a bad job of considering what their sculpture would look like from all angles and the people involved in the procurement process didn't push back. That one seems like more of an indictment of city purchasing processes than the art establishment.
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