The energy and money that used to go into orchestral music, string quartets, piano recitals, et. al, now go into pop music. It's seized that share of the public's attention.
What is this claim based on? The fact that you hear a lot more about both today's pop music and the art music of the past than the art music of the present?
If you think that "the public" used to be interested in art music to anything like the extent they're now interested in popular music, you're under the wrong impression. Serious music has pretty much always been an elite pursuit. Composers of the past worked for elite patrons who wrote the history of their time that we read; whereas today's composers don't get on the TV news, because the people that are interested in their work don't have the kind of political power that kings, nobles, and clergy used to.
In any case, whatever the fluctuations in the relative social status of serious music devotees, I'm quite confident that there is more actual interest (measured in person-hours) in the music of e.g. Mozart today than there has ever been in history.
ETA:
I don't like Berg's music, at all, and I blame him and people who promoted the 2nd Viennese School for the death of great music
Well, I love Berg's music (the Violin Concerto is sublimely beautiful). Great music is not at all dead, and I wish it were better respected. Especially in a place like this.
If you think that "the public" used to be interested in art music to anything like the extent they're now interested in popular music, you're under the wrong impression.
Not everyone could attend concerts, but I have heard many references to musicians performing music by the same composers in small groups in coffeehouses, taverns, and other gathering places. In one of Robert Greenberg's music histories, he said, IIRC, that around 1800, 1 in 20 people in Vienna were professional musicians. You could walk into music shops there whose main busi...
Followup to Stuck in the middle with Bruce:
Bruce is a description of masochistic personality disorder. Bruce's dysfunctional behavior may or may not be related to sexual masochism [safe for work], which is demonized by most people in America. Yet there are ordinary, socially-accepted behaviors that seem partly masochistic to me:
Question 1: Can you list more?
Question 2: Doubtless some of the behaviors I listed have completely different explanations, some of which might not involve masochism at all. Which do you think involve enjoying pain? Can you cluster them by causal mechanism?
Question 3: When we find ourselves acting masochistically, should we try to "correct" it? Or is it part of a healthy human's nature? If so, what's the evolutionary-psych explanation? (I was surprised not to find any evo-psych explanations for masochism on the web; or even any general theory of masochism that tried to unite two different behaviors. All I found were the ideas that sexual masochism is caused by bad childhood models of love, and that masochistic personality is caused by other, unspecified bad experiences. No suggestion that masochism is part of our normal pleasure mechanism.)
Some hypotheses:
My guess is that, if it's a side-effect (e.g., 3) or a non-causal association (4), it's okay to eliminate masochism. Otherwise, that could be risky.
These all lead up to Question 4, which is a fun-theory question: Would purging ourselves of masochism make life less fun?
ADDED: Question 5: Can we train ourselves not to be Bruce without damaging our enjoyment of these other things?