The fine arts don't matter whatever more than to most educated people. This is not a statement of opinion; it is a argument of fact.
Every bit recently as the late 20th century, well-educated people were expected to be able to bluff their way through a dinner party with at to the lowest degree some cognition of "the fine arts" — defined, since the tardily 18th century, as painting, sculpture, orchestral or symphonic music, as distinct from pop music, and trip the light fantastic/ballet. ("Starchitects" notwithstanding, architecture has never really been one of the fine arts — it is too utilitarian, likewise collaborative and likewise public).
A few decades ago, in American gentry circles, information technology would have been a terrible false pas non to have heard of Martha Graham. You lot were expected to know the difference between a French impressionist and an abstract expressionist. Being taken to the symphony and ballet as a kid was a rite of initiation into what Germans call the Bildungsburgertum (the cultivated bourgeoisie).

The "back of the volume" in widely-read journals similar The New Republic andThe Nation regularly reviewed the latest developments in the New York "art scene." If y'all skipped over those sections, you lot did and so with a guilty conscience if you wanted to exist a card-carrying member of the intelligentsia.
This is no longer the example. The latest event of the venerable New York Review of Books, to be sure, has an essay on the new Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Merely to estimate from zines like Vox, the younger generation of literate and well-educated Americans have an intense interest in literate cable television shows like "Game of Thrones" and the bug of race and gender in Marvel Comics movies. Trends in American painting ever since the plate paintings of Julian Schnabel are non a big subject of debate among Millennials. As far as I can tell, very few college-educated people under the age of l pay whatever attention to the old fine arts at all. A search of the newer literary journal n+ane for traditional reviews of gallery shows revealed only this essay by Dushko Petrovich — from 2005:

Painting has been both expressionless and back for a footling while at present, and Greater New York is no exception. Painting hangs out with harsh videos, miniature amusement park rides, and large photos of failed politicians…Many of the paintings seem simply to wish not to keep going, which, if they were sentences or pop songs, would be expected of them. Every bit it is, they tin get away with a pose. Their audience, nonetheless, is less however and moves swiftly toward the café.

There is still an fine art globe, to be certain, in New York and London and Paris and elsewhere. But it is every bit insular and marginal equally the style world, with a similar constituency of rich buyers interacting with producers seeking to sell their wares and establish their brands. Members of the twenty-starting time century educated elite, even members of the professoriate, volition not embarrass themselves if they have never heard of the Venice Biennale.
Many of the Arts Formerly Known as Fine seem to accept lost even a small paying constituency among rich people, and live a grant-to-oral fissure being. In the old days, bohemian painters lived in garrets and tried to involvement gallery owners in their work. Their mod heirs — at least the ones fortunate to have university jobs — can teach classes and apply for grants from benevolent foundations, while creating works of art that nobody may want to buy. Born in bohemia, many aging arts have turned universities into their nursing homes.
What happened? How is information technology that, in only a generation or two, educated Americans went from at to the lowest degree pretending to know and care about the fine arts to paying no attention at all?
The late Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion, blamed the downfall of the fine arts on purveyors of Pop Art like Andy Warhol. And Jeff Koons, who replaced Arnoldian "high seriousness" and the worship of capital letter-c Culture with iconoclasm, mockery, and irony. A Keen Tradition of two millenia that could exist felled by Andy Warhol must take been pretty feeble! But the whole idea of a Phidias-to-Pollock tradition of Neat Western Fine art was unhistorical. The truth is that the evolution (or if you similar the degeneration) from Cezanne to Warhol was inevitable from the moment that majestic, aristocratic and ecclesiastical patronage was replaced by the market.
Having lost their purple and aristocratic patrons, and finding little in the mode of public patronage in modern states, artists from the 19th century to the 21st accept sought new patrons among the wealthy people and institutions who have formed the tiny fine art market. It was not the mockery of Pop artists but the capitalist fine art market place itself which, in its incessant quest for novelty, trivialized and marginalized the arts.
The dynamic is clearest in the example of painting and allied visual arts. Markets tend to prize fashionable novelty over continuity. The shocking and sensational become more attention than subtle variations on traditional conventions and themes. Commercialism, applied to the fine arts, created the artillery race that led to increasingly drastic departures from premodern artistic tradition, until finally, by the late 20th century, "art" could exist everything and therefore nada.
The textbooks in my higher fine art history classes lied about this. The texts treated the sequence from Cezanne to Picasso to Pollock every bit purely formal developments within a tradition unaffected by vulgar commercial considerations, like fads and branding and bids for attention — unlike, say, the rise and fall of fins on cars.
In fact Picasso, like Warhol and Koons after him, Picasso was rewarded by the market place for pushing the boundaries a bit further for a progressively-jaded audience of rich private and institutional collectors. The novelty-driven fine art they produced for private purchasers was and is different in kind from the traditional art deputed for church and state.
The procedure of escalating sensationalism ultimately reaches its reductio advertizement absurdum in any fashion-based industry. In the case of painting and sculpture the point of exhaustion was reached by the 1970s with Pop Fine art and minimalist art and earth art and conceptual art. Tin a row of cars be art? Sure. Can an empty canvas be art? Sure. Does anybody care? No.
That's why I want my coin back.
The share of my college tuition that went to a few art history classes wouldn't amount to much, even with interest. But the time I that wasted on studying what, in hindsight, was nothing more than than a serial of imperceptible stylistic fashions amidst rich people in the Paris and New York fine art worlds, of no lasting significance whatsoever, is time that I could take been devoted to subjects of real cultural importance to members of educated people in our own day and age. Like Marvel comic book heroes and the movies they inspire.
Source: The Smart Prepare.