Also, very few are ever going to admit, even to themselves, that their motivation is impressing others. More likely they will, uhh, take offense at the suggestion. Hey, I remember my sister accusing teenage me of only liking the kind of music that I liked because it was cool to like it. And yeah, I was offended. Doesn't mean there isn't validity there.
I gave examples of whole social cultures that revolve around a musical genre. And I'm not saying there isn't some value in whatever music they like. But do you think it is just coincidental that tastes in music, art, sports, etc aligns so closely with cultures where people have a vested interest in fitting in?
I remember as a kid trying SO HARD to care about professional football, because it was cool to like a team, or at least to be able to talk about a game that happened on sunday. I gave up after a while. I have friends now that if I really want to fit in with, I need to like expensive scotch and enjoy talking about it (I'm sure I could get used to it, but my natural reflex is to spit it out), or maybe I should take up golf, and try to really care about what to me is a deadly dull sport.
south park has made great fun of this with their portrayal of goth kids complaining that everyone is conformist and then demanding that their friends be conform to be just like them, like the same music they like and wear black.
Christi's work required a ton of money, that had to come from somewhere. It clearly wasn't the mass appeal, since he didn't sell tickets or anything. It was rich people who wanted to impress one another with their sophisticated sense of art. (or maybe just with the fact that they had so much money burning holes in their pockets)
As a fan of certain avant-garde music, I've talked with a fair few fellow concertgoers about what their "origin story" is, how they got into this music that appeals only to a niche. It never had to do with discovering a community of fans and wanting to fit in with them – discovering like-minded people only happened later. Rather, the exposure to the avant-garde music was something random. Often it was seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey and being bowled over by the György Ligeti pieces in the score.
In my own case, I owe my discovery of this music to listening to one of the new-arrivals CDs in the classical-music section of my local record shop (remember CDs and listening booths?). What I heard made me hooked for life, and it was some years before I ever discovered any kind of group that I could even be in with.
The same is true of visual art. Vastly more people like Vasarely or Bacon because they stumbled upon one of those Taschen volumes in a bookshop, than hang out in art-gallery circles and actually talk to other art lovers.
So excuse me if I take offense at your post, which seems to dismiss music that authentically gives us pleasure (and initially a purely solitary pleasure) by tarring us fans as disingenous frauds or peacocks. There is almost always someone who posts the same thing as you in these kind of discussions, and it never ceases to disappoint me.