The Pleasure Wars  

“Throughout virtually all of recorded history, the makers of high culture were fully integrated into their society. . . . Then, toward the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, this tacit, durable cultural compact was radically subverted As the Victorian century went its way, painters, composers, and the rest formed avantgardes to fight lively and implacable pleasure wars in which they confronted the dominant, hopelessly conventional middle class with all the energy at their command.

[...]

“Quarrels over the arts became quite directly quarrels over politics.”

--The Pleasure Wars (1998) by Peter Gay