That's Spengler's argument in this Asia Times essay, at any rate. Within that discussion, however, Spengler muses about why modern art is so much more popular with the public than "modern" music—and that's the hmmm part of his essay—that music, unlike the plastic arts, can only be experienced within time.
"When you view an abstract expressionist canvas, time is in your control," says Spengler. "You may spend as much or as little time as you like, click your tongue, attempt to say something sensible and, if you are sufficiently pretentious, quote something from the Wikipedia write-up on the artist that you consulted before arriving at the gallery. When you listen to atonal music, for example Schoenberg, you are stuck in your seat for a quarter of an hour that feels like many hours in a dentist's chair. You cannot escape. You do not admire the abstraction from a distance. You are actually living inside it."
Via John Marks.
