Fashions

"But the ambition to write a work which is ahead of its time and which will preferably not be understood too soon - which will shock as many people as possible - has nothing to do with art, even though many art critics have fostered this attitude and popularized it.
Fashions, I suppose, are as unavoidable in art as in many other fields. But it should be obvious that those rare artists who were not only masters of their art but blessed with the gift of originality were seldom anxious to follow a fashion, never tried to be leaders of fashion. Neither Johann Sebastian Bach nor Mozart nor Schubert created a new fashion or "style" in music....
But although fashions may be unavoidable, and although new styles may emerge, we ought to despise attempts to be fashionable. It should be obvious that "modernism" - the to be new or different at any price, to be ahead of one's to produce "The Work of Art of the Future" (the title of essay by Wagner) - has nothing to do with the things an artist should value and should try to create....
Of course I do not blame an artist or a musician for to say something new. What I really blame many of the "modern" musicians for is their failure to love great music - great masters and their miraculous works, the greatest perhaps that man has produced."

K. Popper, UNENDED QUEST