A theory not postulated: when people are complaining about works in the modern aesthetic, are they saying they actually don't like the aesthetic, or they don't like the particular examples they regularly come in contact with?<p>Let's say a genuinely creative architect is tasked with building a library in a city along a river. He goes to great length creating a design that incorporates the nature of the location and makes an iconic landmark for the city, a new beloved classic. All the surrounding cities want libraries that look like that one which was so good. But these other cities have different geographies, copy and pasting the building ruins what made it appealing in the first place. You can pick up on some aesthetic notes, but without doing the hard work that was done for the original, you still wind up getting a much more generic and commoditized copy. For the vast majority of people, its these cheap imitations they will deal with day in and day out. They compare these new works to the older buildings which were truly designed with their cities in mind, and find the generic buildings lacking. They might note that the original looks good, but even a broken clock is right twice a day, and likewise just because someone used the style well once doesn't make it good.<p>You see this in many cases. Someone in a well tailored suit selected to match their figure looks great; but they are drops in an ocean of people wearing suits in standard sizes with maybe $10 of alteration work. There are loads of beautiful modern and abstract works of art; but they are typically lost in a sea of far more mediocre works and there is no real way to classify which is which without looking at them for yourself.<p>And note that the same principle would hold even if the current modern aesthetic embraced something other than minimalism. The Taj Mahal may be a beautiful work, but if a building of roughly the same style were common in every city, each made by the lowest bidder with little concern for the quality of the final product, you'd probably find the style extremely unappealing.<p>However our modern society has internalized normalcy. It is incredibly uncomfortable to stand out. Because a few people look good in well tailored suits, everyone in the office must wear a suit, or face the embarrassment of being a non-conformer. Or on a different coast, perhaps it is the one person who can really rock the suit who must nevertheless forego it to blend in with a field of t-shirts and cargo shorts. Being creative and individualistic means wearing a strange color pair of socks with the otherwise standard outfit - everything is unique, but in a standard framework where very little is original. Minimalism is thus a sensible choice - adding anything adds uniqueness but none of that uniqueness is integral.