Abstract art and abstract politics
The year 2016 has shown that the ordinary people have become disaffected with the ruling elites. The "ruling elites", broadly speaking, include politicians, political commentators and journalists in the mainstream media, and other learned pundits who broadcast their erudite opinions on the public. The result, however, is that the public ignores them and increasingly supports the anti-establishment opposition, - which is called "populist" because it is not endorsed by the establishment. The pundits denounce the "populist" leaders and their ideas, although they do also analyze these ideas, even if only to explain how untenable they are. The public continues to ignore the pundits and continues to hold "populist" ideas.

It occurred to me that the situation is quite similar to what happened in the arts (visual arts as well as music and, to some extent, literature) about 100 to 50 years ago. Art has split into "academic" and "popular" directions. The "academic" direction has all but lost any popular appeal and support. Learned pundits denounce the "popular" direction of art as lowly and undeserving of their erudite attention -- although they do, of course, study the popular art "purely academically". The public continues to ignore these opinions and consumes more or less exclusively the "popular" art.

Abstract art (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANA8SI_KvqI) is unpopular because it has no direct appeal to a person unless that person has spent long years studying that particular art (painting, music, poetry, etc.) and its history. What is the artists' motivation for creating that kind of art? Artists today are very sophisticated and inherit a rich palette of expressive tools developed in the centuries past. They could certainly choose the best tools from every epoch and create masterpieces that would give us thrills every time. But they don't do that. (Except, of course, the "popular" artists, who do exactly that!)

I conjecture that, psychologically, "academic" artists work to impress other artists, rather than to communicate any emotion (or anything at all) to the wider public. To impress fellow artists, who are equally sophisticated, an artist must avoid the idioms that have been used very often. As a result, artists are uninterested in creating works of art using conventional expressive tools - for instance, painting a life-like human face and figure using conventional colors against a realistic-looking scenery. This kind of art will perhaps please an average person but is boring to the artist and is not going to impress the artist's colleagues or the learned critics.

Thus, having put their personal ego and psychological comfort above all else, the contemporary "academic" artists have failed their basic mission - to create artificial emotional stimulus for the general public. As a lay consumer of visual arts, I like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco paintings. (http://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Creation_of_Adam) When I contemplate those paintings, I do not consider whether it was boring to the artist to paint them, or whether Michelangelo successfully impressed his fellow artists with his art. It was certainly a lot of work, and perhaps some of that work was boring for Michelangelo to do, but it's the artist's job to do that work. Maybe it would have been less boring to Michelangelo if he instead painted "white lines on white background", but that would do nothing to give any emotional stimulus to us.

This completes the analogy to politics. Contemporary politicians, similarly to abstract artists, give us "abstract politics" - ideas that impress their peers and journalists but do not appeal to the wider public any more. Politics is still at the beginning of the transition to "abstract politics" where a politician's speech would be completely meaningless to a lay person - but highly praised by the expert critics and pundits.

By putting their personal interests above their mission, "abstract politicians" are going to fail their mission and to fail us, just as abstract artists started to fail us about 50 years ago.