Why do we hate modern classical music?

I am annoyed by this post a bit. I think the first problem is that to the average person who likes classical music, the stuff he is talking about has absolutely nothing to do with what they think of as classical music. They have attempted to hijacked a genre from its popular meaning. His analogy to modern art is revealing as modern art took great pains to distance and distinguish itself from the movements that came before it. By contrast, this "new" music is desperate to inherit the mantle of the classical label while abandoning the core tenants of why people like it in the first place. In all other walks of music, artists just write and play it, the listeners categorize and name it. Classical music is, by contrast, a tightly controlled club with a bunch of smart guys deciding behind a curtain what is and is not legitimately classical. In the real world, new genres are formed constantly and people are expected to have preferences. I can imagine how silly this article would sound if he was pondering why more Trance fans don't like Industrial (after all, they are both electronica). Mostly though, I find it massively hypocritical to criticize audiences as obsessed with "dead composers" while insisting that this new music, unrecognizable to most listeners be called classical music. They are themselves attempting to lay claim to the same legacy that the author is deriding his audience for obsessing over.

If you're interested in whether and how postmodern art/music/architecture has innate and/or learned appeal to people, there's a whole chapter Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate that discusses it. IIRC he argued that while one can acquire a taste for nearly anything, not all tastes are acquired.