[BobaFloutist]

Yes, you are clearly also very educated. Impressive use of language!

I think it's pretty normal that as people get deeper and more invested in any given artform, they tend to become more appreciative of works that are less immediately pleasing to lay-people. You mentioned literature and (atonal) music, but this just as readily applies to food, wine, videogames, Anime, fashion, anything you can think of.

I'll agree that there's an unfortunate tendency for some people (again, in any artistic field) to get overly critical or dismissive of straightforwardly good work, especially if consuming, thinking about, and discussing the quality of work is their actual job and they're perhaps getting a bit bored of something they once loved. On the other hand, who better to recognize oversaturation of a given style or approach? I certainly wouldn't notice that wine producers are currently chasing the trend of dry whites, produced from heirloom European grapes to the detriment of all other kinds of wine! It's important to have at least some snobs, to push and goad artists away from currently oversaturated trends and continue the cycle of innovation and variety. And it's important to recognize that a critic complaining that a certain style is too popular doesn't mean they think it's a bad style or that you shouldn't enjoy it, just that they'd like to spend more of their life enjoying other things too.

[babypuncher]

To put it another way, today's avant-garde is tomorrow's mainstream.

[BobaFloutist]

Yup. Hence why we went from too much patriotism post-9/11 to too dark after Nolan Batman to too quippy after the Marvel takeover.

I remember first watching The Avengers and finding it refreshing. "This is fun! Why aren't more action movies fun? They're always so gritty and violent and serious, even though the protagonists are functionally superhuman, they're always so mean-spirited and the dialogue is is always so aggressively masculine and primitive and angry." And then that was everything for the next few decades.

[rbanffy]

Not quite. It’ll first be masticated, digested, and excreted before a simplistic version of it becomes the next mainstream.

Perhaps a more accurate (and less cruel) analogy would be that it will receive some scaffolding to sustain it - the leading edge is always unfinished. By the time it becomes mainstream, it’s closer to a product than an idea.