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With respect to art, and I understand that my opinion may not be shared, it can be argued that no masterpieces were produced in the 20th Century. I am a big fan of classical music but the works I keep going back to listen to are by composers such as J.S. Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Handel, and Monteverdi. None of those composers, except maybe Handel (who moved to England), ever came close to striking it rich. I find it hard to listen to any classical piece of music that was produced after about 1910 or so (Mahler).

I'm not sure how that ties into your argument that nobody writes a great work for profit, but that has been my observation. I'm quite sure that if anybody today wrote a symphony that could compare with one written by Beethoven in the early 19th Century, he would be greatly rewarded monetarily. Why then, hasn't anything as good as Beethoven ever been produced in the past 100 years?

This is a interesting point.

I would argue that across the arts, from sculpture to painting to music to writing, the 20th century lost track.

I guess it's aprtly due to the fact that while the nineteenth century focused on technical perfection, the twentieth focused on newness and difference.

In my opinion (and I realize I'm now moving into a purely personal realm of taste) the last truly great prose was written by Beckett and Robbe-Grillet.

I'll use them as an example. They both did very bold new things and violated the rules of grammar and narrative in their work. But they shared the nineteenth century notion of perfection: they carefully worked on their writing - every aspect of their work is intentional and fits into a larger whole.

The problem is, anyone else can now come along, write a jumble of hard-to-parse words nearly at random, and claim to be just as entitled to respect as a Beckett.

That's the paradox - if Beckett wanted to he could have written a near-perfect parody of Samuel Johnson or Cardinal Newman or any other great English prose stylist. In his work you can catch echoes and snippets of the KJV or Sterne. He knew perfectly how to write in a traditional, conventional way. Whereas "avant-garde" writers today could never do so - they do not have the craft, the skill and knowledge that Beckett had.

But throw hard-to-read prose by Beckett and by a scribbler in front of the average person and they will be equally unimpressed.

I suspect it's much the same with music: the really excellent musicians can interpret the classical tradition. But new movements like Serialism tend to eliminate all possibility of craft from music.

Beethoven is now so long gone, as is his world, that it would be tough to create music like his today without simply being labeled and old-fashioned rip-off artist.

Isn't Barber's Adagio for Strings a 20th century work? Having TRIED To listen to works by the masters of European Art music(aka classical) I can say there is much that is beautiful and much that is overly fanciful and more a display of skill rather than a work of beauty.

I'm no scholar, but much of 'classical' music was the soundtrack score of its day, set to operas rather than film. IMO, not only is Barber's Adagio superior as a single piece to almost anything ever composed, so are a few pieces by modern day composers of film scores--Zimmer, Williams and Horner have all composed music that will be remembered for as long as Beethoven.

Indeed much of what is considered "great" is great by virtue of the fact that there was not a mass production of such music until very recently. Prince himself is incredibly prolific and learned to play over 20 instruments by ear, but I doubt many Beethoven fans will acknowledge his genius.

Now that there is more competition and music released pretty regularly, I doubt much of what is considered great now, will be common listening fare 200 years from now.