I am very much a high culture, classical education kind of guy, but with live-and-let-live, populist undertones. I have little patience with snobs, or dilettantes, or people who think that because they have a temprament for high art, they are in some moral sense superior.
Art is not for dabblers. It requires passion and sacrifice. Admire it if you can, but don't think yourself especially precious for it. The man in the arena is worth a hundred of you.
The Beautiful and the Good are NOT the same thing (though it's nice when they overlap). I can, if necessary get along with snobs long to enough to prove yet again that their money is as green as anyones. But that's the extent of it.
Take music for example. Someone who truly 'gets it' doesn't give a tinker's damn if you don't like Mozart, or if classical music concerts are not well attended, because I do, and furthermore I know (being a semi-professional musician) that Mozart is probably the best of the best EVER with Bach a close second, and Beethoven hanging close, and no one can convince me that all music is equal. On the other hand, while Opera is unquestionably a great art, I don't care for it in the least, unless I'm playing for one, or somebody I know is in one (though there are a couple of specific operas I truly like.) It is just as much nonsense to try and force someone to like something he is not, by temperament or cultural factors, suited to like as it is to say all things are equal. San Francisco is a city dedicated to the idea that the Beautiful is the Good, and the lover of
ahrt is morally superior to the hick. Which is crap.
There are some forms of music that, though very earthy, are just as untinged by the 'commercial' and just require as much virtuosity as the Great Music - certain kinds of bluegrass and jazz come to mind here. Being a lover of great beauty, I would love to master all the arts it takes to make one of these ...
... (including metallurgy, ornamental turning, guilloche engraving, machine shop technique, etc...) But, as Charlie Chaplain said, we are all amateurs. We don't live long enough to become anything else. I have done excellent work in this pen turning medium, and I have seen others doing excellent work too. This is very gratifying, since I believe that music and other arts were made for man, not man for them, and they are best when done by many, even if they don't always come up to the highest standards that the best can do. Great artists are usually personable and encoruaging of all efforts, because, for one thing, it's only by having enough people around trying to do great work, that that you can have a lot people who will understand and appreciate great work (for what that's worth) when it shows up. I am a very good hornist. That is why I can tell you why, exactly, the great hornists are better than me.
I would love to be able to make that Pheonix pen or that Victoria beauty, but one cannot do everything. Though I hope to live long enough to try.