I think there’s also a financial reason: The longer an art style has been around, the harder it gets to make something unique and therefore the harder it gets to sell your work at a high price. Modernism in essence just got rid of the principles of traditional architecture (symmetries, ornament, etc.), and this opened up new opportunities to stand out with one’s designs. All that an architect/artist then has to do is sell it as something special, which modernists have done by intellectualising it.
There are also just engineering reasons for modern architecture. You can't make a skyscraper out of bricks. It's hard to beat steel and concrete for strength and cost in a large building. And then of course you're going to cover it in windows because that lets more light in, which the inhabitants want.
So just from those engineering considerations you get a skyscraper that looks like every other generic skyscraper.
I think modern architecture - some distinctive abstract style other than a big glass cuboid - is preferable to a generic skyscraper, and I think most people would agree. And although traditional architecture might be aesthetically preferable to modern architecture, you just can't make a really big building out of that for engineering reasons.
That only applies to skyscrapers, and still it's possible to build glass-and-steel façades in traditional styles. Some buildings from the art nouveau and art deco style were built that way.
The vast majority of buildings aren't skyscrapers and therefore don't have to be built with glass and steel, and traditional architecture can be very cheap to build. Brick or plaster façades can be very pretty, if they're symmetrical and the proportions are traditional.
The vast majority of buildings are normal residential houses, which are built in traditional styles with no architect. Modernist architecture is for giant buildings.
You put a brick or plaster facade on your giant building, and you don't have as many windows. People inside want windows. Plus it costs extra and carries the risk of the facade falling off onto the street. They do often put a facade on anyway.
See John Carey’s book ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’ which examines the intellectual snobbery and contempt for the masses among the literary elite which manifests in art which is deliberately ‘avant garde’ and thus exclusive.
The story of MoMA is detailed in the book "Picasso's War", which shows that Picasso, and modern art in general, was pushed on the public by the relentless efforts over 20 years of 3 art dealers and a few stubborn wealthy patrons, notably Gertrude and Leo Stein and Aldrich Rockefeller.
(Oddly, the modernist painter that the public reviled the most seems to have been Matisse, who would be my favorite outside of Monet and the Futurists.)
Have you noticed that only this year are car manufacturers beginning to make a few nicely-colored cars for the US? Since about 2016, all cars sold in the US have had angry slanted headlights and slashing, aggressive lines for body trim. From 2020-2023, they were painted almost exclusively black, white, gray, silver, dark metallic blue, or the dark red of congealed blood. Those same manufacturers continued selling similar cars painted in cheerful colors, with friendly round headlights, in Japan and Asia, and much of Europe.
I’ve written a series about the science of architecture that you’ll find interesting. It explains what really sets apart modern architecture and why we’re evolved to find it ugly, why it emerged anyway and what externalities it produces according to research. Here’s the introduction:
Something I find persuasive as an aspect of it is that modern art and architecture signal wealth and status without being things that non-elite people would want
If Bill Gates lives in a richly ornamented home, not only is he richer than you, he has something you want and could never afford. You can afford a smaller version of a modern style house, if you want it
I think SA's next-to-last segment, titled "…As A Change From Signaling Wealth To Signaling Taste", starts to get at it. As has been noted elsewhere, standards of beauty tend to evolve towards what is difficult to obtain because they're a signaling device and what's the point of an easily obtained or copied signal?
In a lot of fields, this moving target can be fed by either creating artificial scarcity or by moving the goalposts rapidly such that it requires more resources to track the target. Fashion in clothing seems to rely on the latter, constantly creating churn so that the cognoscenti can keep at the head of the pack.
The former, artificial scarcity, can be observed in watches and similar luxury goods. A McLaren or Patek Philippe doesn't require much more in the way of resources than a Ford or a Citizen (specialized labor to the side), but their production lines aren't optimized or scaled so as to make them available to everybody. So again they act as a useful signal.
When we come to high-end public architecture, you get a similar impulse combined with the fact that buildings are expensive capital goods and taxpayers/shareholders are going to revolt if you go way over budget. A building with mass appeal wouldn't signal that you (as the sponsor/commissioner/CEO) are special, while there's no way to justify solid-gold plating or hand-carved gargoyles or what have you. So instead a somewhat off-putting style that depends on elite knowledge of trends is elevated to being the target. This way the sponsor gets to show off that they're powerful and in-the-know without doing more obviously crazy stuff.
A similar effect is probably present in the trend towards skyscrapers in places that otherwise don't really seem to need them. The Burj Khalifa is a monument, for instance. But you can't justify building a mile-high pyramid these days, a bunch of stakeholders will object. So you build something that's decently functional but go out of your way to make it super-tall or weird-looking (see much Chinese skyscraper design) in order to still count coup.
The basic idea here is that once easily readable markers of beauty are no longer exclusive to elites (whether because of mass affluence, mass production, diffusion of how-to, etc), elites shift to markers that are hard to evaluate or still difficult to obtain, making taste itself the scarce commodity. This explains why architecture and other arts often prioritize complex or avant-garde forms that are inscrutable to most but legible to elite taste communities.
OK you're specifically talking about modernism in *buildings* here which, I think, is crucial.
If you want to understand Modernism's place in art in general I think read Vonnegut's BLUEBEARD and BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS then come back and we can talk.
But if you want to talk about *buildings* I think it's all a lot simpler.
Modernist buildings are just cheaper. They required much less skilled labor.
Once upon a time, beautiful buildings were table stakes. Which meant:
a) Lots of craftsmen so the price of it wasn't TOO high
b) your competitors built that way too so no marginal disadvantage to building pretty, since everyone was basically doing it.
Modernism permitted people to go plain and cheap and once lots of people were doing it everyone had to do it because it became the inverse of B. And because of that A also decreased precipitously.
This one is easy.
With painting it's more complicated but I actually think modernism as a moment is defensible (tho no one really needs to do any more of it unless they move the ball somehow)
A big part of the answer to how unpopular things become famous is that, for some reason, sometime just before 1900 it became either easier, more profitable, or more necessary for intellectuals to form conspiracies to gain intellectual prestige. I think this was due to the over-supply of intellectuals, to the point where merit simply was not sufficient for success.
I've looked into the popularity of "classics" most people don't like; and so far, the reason for their rise to classic status has always been due to press manipulation, usually via a conspiracy to promote them. Good, popular works have also come more and more to rely on networking and marketing than on quality.
The first modern intellectual conspiracy I know of was the Impressionists. They conspired only in forming a group to gain more attention than any one of them could, to stage exhibitions, etc. They had no academic prestige or political power, and not much money. They didn't manipulate the press; the press hated them for years. The public came to love them /despite/ the opposition of the elite.
Next up was the Bloomsbury Group, notably John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry. I think they did a lot of great work, though perhaps had a net negative impact on account of Keynes. These authors were upper-class, with access to wealth and power, and some were editors. They used all these assets to promote each other heavily. At about the same time, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, & TS Eliot formed a group which used similar tactics to publish and promote high modernist fiction and poetry. Both groups had their own publishing houses, funded by wealthy acquaintances; both groups flooded the literary magazines with glowing reviews of their own works.
I looked into /Ulysses/, of course. Ezra Pound spend years building a network of funders, publishers, critics, and writers, in order to change the face of literature. He didn't know what he wanted; he just knew it had to be /strange/. He finally settled on James Joyce's /Ulysses/. It was serialized in 1918-1920 by two magazines Pound was an editor for (/The Little Review/ and /The Egoist/), then published later by /Shakespeare and Company/, a publishing house Pound had already created for this purpose, by putting publisher and moneybags together (Tytell 1987, p. 167-8). The book came out in 1922 to a spate of ecstatic reviews, all of which were written by friends of Pound or Joyce, or by Pound himself; an even larger number of harsh negative reviews; and (as far as I have discovered) three mostly positive, unbiased, non-anonymous reviews. See Southam (2013) and Deming (1970) for collections of reviews.
A conspiracy which produced popular books was the Inklings, whose attendees included JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. (Dorothy Sayers also networked with them, but, as a woman, was never allowed to attend their meetings.) All these people were elite academics lecturing at Oxford, and they used their influence as such to promote each other, although they aspired to literary quality rather than to popular success. Tolkien showed little interest in getting published at all, and probably would not have been without Lewis' promotion and encouragement.
William Faulkner got his first novel published solely because he was Sherwood Anderson's best friend. He was out-of-print and critically dismissed in 1947. Between 1943 and 1958, the Rockefeller Foundation spent almost $500,000 paying famous literary journals and critics to promote American writers with an anti-communist ideology. The famous critics were all Southerners determined to promote a Southerner. They decided to promote Faulkner after their first three or so choices declined to cooperate. As a result, his novel /Intruder in the Dust/ was made into a movie in 1949, and he won the Nobel the next year. (Schwartz 1988, p. 69, 80, 94). See my post "Review: "Creating Faulkner's Reputation". (www.fimfiction.net/blog/751143 . An important quote: "One thing that comes up over and over again in the book is how much winning literary wars depends on money. Literary critics fought each other with "little magazines", which had circulations of a few thousand, none of which were ever profitable. They had to continually search for donors to pay their editors and writers, and the donors were always political." )
Penguin paid Zadie Smith a £250,000 advance for her first novel, /White Teeth/, before she'd written more than a small fraction of it, not because it was original, but because it was /unoriginal/: a combination of so many leftist ideological views and post-modernist tropes that they felt sure the literati would swoon before it. Plus, she was at Oxford, and she was black (Pouly 2016). She wrote it in her spare time during the end-of-term finals weeks. It won the 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2000 Whitbread Book Award for best first novel, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. See my post "White Teeth: Anatomy of a 'quality' bestseller". (www.fimfiction.net/blog/725006, I really recommend you read the whole thing)
Erika Mitchell got a 7-figure advance for /Fifty Shades of Grey/ in 2011 because an article by Anne Jamison (Jamison & Grosman 2013) accidentally fooled publishers into thinking that the 2 million /hits/ on Mitchell's fanfic were 2 million /readers/ (compared to a more-likely estimate of 10-20,000 readers). The publishers spent millions on a marketing blitz that led to /Fifty Shades of Grey/ being not just the book most often sold, but also the book most-often given away to the Salvation Army by disappointed readers. See my post "Fifty Shades of Landfill" (www.fimfiction.net/blog/610998).
Best-selling horror author J. D. Barker began using social media to experiment scientifically with details of his books and with his creative marketing strategies, and to get feedback from readers, in 2014 when he was unknown. He gathered a large following by writing a humorous blog from his dog's point of view, and by letting randomly-chosen followers each choose the name for one of the characters in his next book. He let his Twitter followers choose how to write his name (jdbarker.com/time-pick-name/) (which is Jonathan Dylan Barker), crowdsources cover design choices, reads his reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, tracks the return-on-investment of every marketing strategy. (This is all based on his talk at the Confluence SF&F convention, Pittsburgh, Aug. 5 2017.) He invites comments and corrections from his readers (jdbarker.com/contact) and follows 79,000 of his own 88,000 Twitter followers.
I found similar results looking into modern art and architecture.
References
Robert Deming, ed., 1970. /James Joyce: The Critical Heritage V1: 1902-1927/. Delhi: Vikas.
Anne Jamison & Lev Grossman, 2013. /Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World/. Dallas, TX: Smart Pop.
Marie-Pierre Pouly, 2016. "Playing both sides of the field: Anatomy of a 'quality' bestseller". /Poetics/ 59: 20-34.
Lawrence Schwartz, 1988. /Creating Faulkner's Reputation/. Knoxville: U of Tennessee.
B.C. Southam, 2ed 2013. /James Joyce/. Routledge.
John Tytell, 1987. /Ezra Pound: The solitary volcano/. NYC: Doubleday.
It seems to me the rise of modern classical music around the start of the 20th century was due to innovation itself becoming a badge of artistic merit, because (a) rapid change in the rest of the world made 19th century stuff including music seem old fashioned, (b) the need to differentiate from popular music in order to seem more serious/intellectual/prestigious.
Whether this was driven by a shift in power from audiences to artists I don’t know. But audiences were certainly left behind by some of it (eg the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, but not say the Impressionistic music of Debussy).
A result of this incidentally was that up to say 1980 classical music went through a huge amount of experimentation, including massive failures (eg serialism - ultra-modern music that was militantly fashionable among composers for a while but hated by listeners) - but all rather too fast, and without producing that much of high quality. Since 1980 there has been more reconsideration of all this experimentation, reworking some of the more promising ideas previously touched on.
Also financial pressures from shrinking audiences and public subsidies have in recent decades forced composers to take more heed of the popularity of their music. And younger composers are less bothered by the erstwhile snobbish pressure to distance themselves from more popular genres such as film music.
I had a housemate--komponisto from lesswrong, if you know him--who was a university-trained composer. After living with him for many months, I said, "I've never heard your music. May I?" And he said, "Oh, it isn't meant to be /heard/."
I'm surprised you didn't link to your colleague (and old co-author) Tyler Cowen's "An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture" https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2000-cowen.pdf
I think an economic rational-agent approach to explain something which is obviously ideological, is hopeless. Modernist art was part of a larger political/Hegelian revolutionary movement. It isn't coincidence that nearly every respectable modern artist and writer, and most modernist architects, sympathized with either fascists or communists.
I think there’s also a financial reason: The longer an art style has been around, the harder it gets to make something unique and therefore the harder it gets to sell your work at a high price. Modernism in essence just got rid of the principles of traditional architecture (symmetries, ornament, etc.), and this opened up new opportunities to stand out with one’s designs. All that an architect/artist then has to do is sell it as something special, which modernists have done by intellectualising it.
There are also just engineering reasons for modern architecture. You can't make a skyscraper out of bricks. It's hard to beat steel and concrete for strength and cost in a large building. And then of course you're going to cover it in windows because that lets more light in, which the inhabitants want.
So just from those engineering considerations you get a skyscraper that looks like every other generic skyscraper.
I think modern architecture - some distinctive abstract style other than a big glass cuboid - is preferable to a generic skyscraper, and I think most people would agree. And although traditional architecture might be aesthetically preferable to modern architecture, you just can't make a really big building out of that for engineering reasons.
That only applies to skyscrapers, and still it's possible to build glass-and-steel façades in traditional styles. Some buildings from the art nouveau and art deco style were built that way.
The vast majority of buildings aren't skyscrapers and therefore don't have to be built with glass and steel, and traditional architecture can be very cheap to build. Brick or plaster façades can be very pretty, if they're symmetrical and the proportions are traditional.
The vast majority of buildings are normal residential houses, which are built in traditional styles with no architect. Modernist architecture is for giant buildings.
You put a brick or plaster facade on your giant building, and you don't have as many windows. People inside want windows. Plus it costs extra and carries the risk of the facade falling off onto the street. They do often put a facade on anyway.
See John Carey’s book ‘The Intellectuals and the Masses’ which examines the intellectual snobbery and contempt for the masses among the literary elite which manifests in art which is deliberately ‘avant garde’ and thus exclusive.
Rockefeller and their ilk started MOMA .
Massive money laundering through ugly art.
The communist style architecture posing as Green.
Ugly Art
Nothing inspired.
Soulless
All to dull the crowds into Grey. The popular color these days. Grey.
The story of MoMA is detailed in the book "Picasso's War", which shows that Picasso, and modern art in general, was pushed on the public by the relentless efforts over 20 years of 3 art dealers and a few stubborn wealthy patrons, notably Gertrude and Leo Stein and Aldrich Rockefeller.
(Oddly, the modernist painter that the public reviled the most seems to have been Matisse, who would be my favorite outside of Monet and the Futurists.)
Have you noticed that only this year are car manufacturers beginning to make a few nicely-colored cars for the US? Since about 2016, all cars sold in the US have had angry slanted headlights and slashing, aggressive lines for body trim. From 2020-2023, they were painted almost exclusively black, white, gray, silver, dark metallic blue, or the dark red of congealed blood. Those same manufacturers continued selling similar cars painted in cheerful colors, with friendly round headlights, in Japan and Asia, and much of Europe.
I have a meme from the 1970’s
Beautiful, colorful, diverse lines 😉
Now , Grey , black and yes. Angry.
Well said
I’ve written a series about the science of architecture that you’ll find interesting. It explains what really sets apart modern architecture and why we’re evolved to find it ugly, why it emerged anyway and what externalities it produces according to research. Here’s the introduction:
https://open.substack.com/pub/revocap/p/architecture-and-evolution-introduction?utm_source=direct&r=rxmmq&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
If it delivers on what the summary promises, it will be well worth reading.
Something I find persuasive as an aspect of it is that modern art and architecture signal wealth and status without being things that non-elite people would want
If Bill Gates lives in a richly ornamented home, not only is he richer than you, he has something you want and could never afford. You can afford a smaller version of a modern style house, if you want it
I think SA's next-to-last segment, titled "…As A Change From Signaling Wealth To Signaling Taste", starts to get at it. As has been noted elsewhere, standards of beauty tend to evolve towards what is difficult to obtain because they're a signaling device and what's the point of an easily obtained or copied signal?
In a lot of fields, this moving target can be fed by either creating artificial scarcity or by moving the goalposts rapidly such that it requires more resources to track the target. Fashion in clothing seems to rely on the latter, constantly creating churn so that the cognoscenti can keep at the head of the pack.
The former, artificial scarcity, can be observed in watches and similar luxury goods. A McLaren or Patek Philippe doesn't require much more in the way of resources than a Ford or a Citizen (specialized labor to the side), but their production lines aren't optimized or scaled so as to make them available to everybody. So again they act as a useful signal.
When we come to high-end public architecture, you get a similar impulse combined with the fact that buildings are expensive capital goods and taxpayers/shareholders are going to revolt if you go way over budget. A building with mass appeal wouldn't signal that you (as the sponsor/commissioner/CEO) are special, while there's no way to justify solid-gold plating or hand-carved gargoyles or what have you. So instead a somewhat off-putting style that depends on elite knowledge of trends is elevated to being the target. This way the sponsor gets to show off that they're powerful and in-the-know without doing more obviously crazy stuff.
A similar effect is probably present in the trend towards skyscrapers in places that otherwise don't really seem to need them. The Burj Khalifa is a monument, for instance. But you can't justify building a mile-high pyramid these days, a bunch of stakeholders will object. So you build something that's decently functional but go out of your way to make it super-tall or weird-looking (see much Chinese skyscraper design) in order to still count coup.
The basic idea here is that once easily readable markers of beauty are no longer exclusive to elites (whether because of mass affluence, mass production, diffusion of how-to, etc), elites shift to markers that are hard to evaluate or still difficult to obtain, making taste itself the scarce commodity. This explains why architecture and other arts often prioritize complex or avant-garde forms that are inscrutable to most but legible to elite taste communities.
OK you're specifically talking about modernism in *buildings* here which, I think, is crucial.
If you want to understand Modernism's place in art in general I think read Vonnegut's BLUEBEARD and BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS then come back and we can talk.
But if you want to talk about *buildings* I think it's all a lot simpler.
Modernist buildings are just cheaper. They required much less skilled labor.
Once upon a time, beautiful buildings were table stakes. Which meant:
a) Lots of craftsmen so the price of it wasn't TOO high
b) your competitors built that way too so no marginal disadvantage to building pretty, since everyone was basically doing it.
Modernism permitted people to go plain and cheap and once lots of people were doing it everyone had to do it because it became the inverse of B. And because of that A also decreased precipitously.
This one is easy.
With painting it's more complicated but I actually think modernism as a moment is defensible (tho no one really needs to do any more of it unless they move the ball somehow)
I think Scott's counter signaling thesis from 2014 is still more robust than a materialist one
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
tl;dr: elites get status by differentiating themselves from the masses and other elites
you can see this cycle happening again with the revival of trad aesthetic as modernism becomes passe and traditionalism becomes countercultural
A big part of the answer to how unpopular things become famous is that, for some reason, sometime just before 1900 it became either easier, more profitable, or more necessary for intellectuals to form conspiracies to gain intellectual prestige. I think this was due to the over-supply of intellectuals, to the point where merit simply was not sufficient for success.
I've looked into the popularity of "classics" most people don't like; and so far, the reason for their rise to classic status has always been due to press manipulation, usually via a conspiracy to promote them. Good, popular works have also come more and more to rely on networking and marketing than on quality.
The first modern intellectual conspiracy I know of was the Impressionists. They conspired only in forming a group to gain more attention than any one of them could, to stage exhibitions, etc. They had no academic prestige or political power, and not much money. They didn't manipulate the press; the press hated them for years. The public came to love them /despite/ the opposition of the elite.
Next up was the Bloomsbury Group, notably John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and Roger Fry. I think they did a lot of great work, though perhaps had a net negative impact on account of Keynes. These authors were upper-class, with access to wealth and power, and some were editors. They used all these assets to promote each other heavily. At about the same time, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, & TS Eliot formed a group which used similar tactics to publish and promote high modernist fiction and poetry. Both groups had their own publishing houses, funded by wealthy acquaintances; both groups flooded the literary magazines with glowing reviews of their own works.
I looked into /Ulysses/, of course. Ezra Pound spend years building a network of funders, publishers, critics, and writers, in order to change the face of literature. He didn't know what he wanted; he just knew it had to be /strange/. He finally settled on James Joyce's /Ulysses/. It was serialized in 1918-1920 by two magazines Pound was an editor for (/The Little Review/ and /The Egoist/), then published later by /Shakespeare and Company/, a publishing house Pound had already created for this purpose, by putting publisher and moneybags together (Tytell 1987, p. 167-8). The book came out in 1922 to a spate of ecstatic reviews, all of which were written by friends of Pound or Joyce, or by Pound himself; an even larger number of harsh negative reviews; and (as far as I have discovered) three mostly positive, unbiased, non-anonymous reviews. See Southam (2013) and Deming (1970) for collections of reviews.
A conspiracy which produced popular books was the Inklings, whose attendees included JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams. (Dorothy Sayers also networked with them, but, as a woman, was never allowed to attend their meetings.) All these people were elite academics lecturing at Oxford, and they used their influence as such to promote each other, although they aspired to literary quality rather than to popular success. Tolkien showed little interest in getting published at all, and probably would not have been without Lewis' promotion and encouragement.
William Faulkner got his first novel published solely because he was Sherwood Anderson's best friend. He was out-of-print and critically dismissed in 1947. Between 1943 and 1958, the Rockefeller Foundation spent almost $500,000 paying famous literary journals and critics to promote American writers with an anti-communist ideology. The famous critics were all Southerners determined to promote a Southerner. They decided to promote Faulkner after their first three or so choices declined to cooperate. As a result, his novel /Intruder in the Dust/ was made into a movie in 1949, and he won the Nobel the next year. (Schwartz 1988, p. 69, 80, 94). See my post "Review: "Creating Faulkner's Reputation". (www.fimfiction.net/blog/751143 . An important quote: "One thing that comes up over and over again in the book is how much winning literary wars depends on money. Literary critics fought each other with "little magazines", which had circulations of a few thousand, none of which were ever profitable. They had to continually search for donors to pay their editors and writers, and the donors were always political." )
Penguin paid Zadie Smith a £250,000 advance for her first novel, /White Teeth/, before she'd written more than a small fraction of it, not because it was original, but because it was /unoriginal/: a combination of so many leftist ideological views and post-modernist tropes that they felt sure the literati would swoon before it. Plus, she was at Oxford, and she was black (Pouly 2016). She wrote it in her spare time during the end-of-term finals weeks. It won the 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2000 Whitbread Book Award for best first novel, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. See my post "White Teeth: Anatomy of a 'quality' bestseller". (www.fimfiction.net/blog/725006, I really recommend you read the whole thing)
Erika Mitchell got a 7-figure advance for /Fifty Shades of Grey/ in 2011 because an article by Anne Jamison (Jamison & Grosman 2013) accidentally fooled publishers into thinking that the 2 million /hits/ on Mitchell's fanfic were 2 million /readers/ (compared to a more-likely estimate of 10-20,000 readers). The publishers spent millions on a marketing blitz that led to /Fifty Shades of Grey/ being not just the book most often sold, but also the book most-often given away to the Salvation Army by disappointed readers. See my post "Fifty Shades of Landfill" (www.fimfiction.net/blog/610998).
Best-selling horror author J. D. Barker began using social media to experiment scientifically with details of his books and with his creative marketing strategies, and to get feedback from readers, in 2014 when he was unknown. He gathered a large following by writing a humorous blog from his dog's point of view, and by letting randomly-chosen followers each choose the name for one of the characters in his next book. He let his Twitter followers choose how to write his name (jdbarker.com/time-pick-name/) (which is Jonathan Dylan Barker), crowdsources cover design choices, reads his reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, tracks the return-on-investment of every marketing strategy. (This is all based on his talk at the Confluence SF&F convention, Pittsburgh, Aug. 5 2017.) He invites comments and corrections from his readers (jdbarker.com/contact) and follows 79,000 of his own 88,000 Twitter followers.
I found similar results looking into modern art and architecture.
References
Robert Deming, ed., 1970. /James Joyce: The Critical Heritage V1: 1902-1927/. Delhi: Vikas.
Anne Jamison & Lev Grossman, 2013. /Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World/. Dallas, TX: Smart Pop.
Marie-Pierre Pouly, 2016. "Playing both sides of the field: Anatomy of a 'quality' bestseller". /Poetics/ 59: 20-34.
Lawrence Schwartz, 1988. /Creating Faulkner's Reputation/. Knoxville: U of Tennessee.
B.C. Southam, 2ed 2013. /James Joyce/. Routledge.
John Tytell, 1987. /Ezra Pound: The solitary volcano/. NYC: Doubleday.
"Modernism was driven by artists & the intellectual circles that surrounded them."
-And their CIA sponsors.
It seems to me the rise of modern classical music around the start of the 20th century was due to innovation itself becoming a badge of artistic merit, because (a) rapid change in the rest of the world made 19th century stuff including music seem old fashioned, (b) the need to differentiate from popular music in order to seem more serious/intellectual/prestigious.
Whether this was driven by a shift in power from audiences to artists I don’t know. But audiences were certainly left behind by some of it (eg the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, but not say the Impressionistic music of Debussy).
A result of this incidentally was that up to say 1980 classical music went through a huge amount of experimentation, including massive failures (eg serialism - ultra-modern music that was militantly fashionable among composers for a while but hated by listeners) - but all rather too fast, and without producing that much of high quality. Since 1980 there has been more reconsideration of all this experimentation, reworking some of the more promising ideas previously touched on.
Also financial pressures from shrinking audiences and public subsidies have in recent decades forced composers to take more heed of the popularity of their music. And younger composers are less bothered by the erstwhile snobbish pressure to distance themselves from more popular genres such as film music.
Yes, the prestige of innovation went way up upon seeing how much innovation had recently added to tech and industry.
I had a housemate--komponisto from lesswrong, if you know him--who was a university-trained composer. After living with him for many months, I said, "I've never heard your music. May I?" And he said, "Oh, it isn't meant to be /heard/."
I'm surprised you didn't link to your colleague (and old co-author) Tyler Cowen's "An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture" https://gwern.net/doc/culture/2000-cowen.pdf
I think an economic rational-agent approach to explain something which is obviously ideological, is hopeless. Modernist art was part of a larger political/Hegelian revolutionary movement. It isn't coincidence that nearly every respectable modern artist and writer, and most modernist architects, sympathized with either fascists or communists.
Alex Tabarrok also has a paper on "A simple model of crime waves, riots, and revolutions"! https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/a-simple-model-of-crime-waves-riots-and-revolutions/