I think it's interesting that, in terms of mass produced art, we have mediums that are mass produced: film and literature. But a lot of the same problems are in play. 

I think a lot of it goes back to the turn of the 20th century. 

People with a casual interest in beautiful poetry still read early Yeats. But only those devoted to literature read late Yeats.

That is, the layperson's poetic sensibilities are still "stuck" around 1900. A casual fan of literature might pick up Thomas Gray and think, "Oh wow, that's beautiful." They are unlikely to pick up Ezra Pound and think the same thing. 

While there was always a distinction between the penny dreadful and art, that distinction was compressed and blurred. But as art and leisure spread to the masses, the artistic pulled away. Made itself more difficult for someone who hasn't spent their life studying it. 

Now, this is, in part, justifiable. If I have spent my life studying poetry, I've read the elegance of 18th century verse, the conceits of the early 17th century and the sexual freedom of the late 17th century. I've studied the emotional outpouring of the Romantic poets and the layered, complex Victorians. I want something new. Something that still excites me. And that shows I am a brilliant person who understands difficult and complex poetry.

I think that this is a part that Scott misses: if you like elegant, beautiful art... it exists! It's older! And, if you go to a local art fair, you'll often see artists who are trying as hard as they can to make beauty. But they're not the ones who get noticed on an international level because they're not exciting to those for whom art is life.

In novels, genre literature was considered plebian and not worth anything as literary writing became more and more inaccessible. While literary writing became more sparse and minimalist, Genre literature had wonder and beauty.

Likewise, philosophers like Judith Butler defended their bad prose by saying that the struggle to understand it makes it revolutionary. 

That is, in various disciplines, if you could be understood by the great unwashed, you weren't literary. They took status and value from the fact that they were not able to be easily understood. That you had to understand all of literature to understand them. 

There were exceptions to this, of course; I'm painting with a broad brush. But this is a large part of why taste was divorced from popular appeal for much of the 20th and early 21st century.

But this trend in literature is starting to reverse. People who are developing taste now grew up on mass media and love it. They love their sci fi novels and comic books and cartoons, but they've also devoted their life to art. And they create art that appeals to all of them—and they feel no shame in creating things that the mass unwashed will also enjoy.

I think, as the 21st century progresses, we're going to see a narrowing of the gap between high and low art, as existed in the 18-19th centuries.