The Tyranny of High Culture

Says Thomas Mann,

"Inborn in almost every artistic nature is a luxuriant, treacherous bias in favour of the injustice that creates beauty, a tendency to sympathize with aristocratic preference and pay it homage."

Or aesthetics in ascetiscism.

"Grace in the midst of torment...it is an active achievement, a positive triumph, and the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol...of the kind of art here in question."

That too.
So they descended into folk art then. But we lead our present to another configuration. It goes something like this: aristocratic without the aristocrat. A surface surfeit.