Classical music

 There's so much deep theory, so much deep stuff in the study of classical music. And pop music, despite being somewhat inspired by and based on the same theory, seems to just throw all that stuff out the window and start over.

But it actually kind of works, because pop music surprises me sometimes. It does new things all the time, perhaps by virtue of discarding the old entirely. And pop music is kind of fun to listen to.

This pattern happens all the time, though. Movies, shows, video games, what have you. Even food. 

It's this dynamic where a field advances to an extent and develops this massive history, culture, and depth and explores all kinds of things. It gets to a point, I guess, where it just becomes so obtuse and dense that the general populace doesn't care anymore and the popular stuff becomes relatively more "basic". 

The "snobs" look down on these works because they're basically things "they've seen before" -- I mean, not literally, because nobody has lived through thousands of years of music, but things that the "theory" has taught them.

And often it's when the pop stuff encroaches on the domain of the more complex that it often gets really good. This can be explained in terms of the dynamics, too... as the audience starts to re-learn, basically, the theory that already exists classically because they start getting numb to the "quick fix" effects and tire of the same old thing (e.g. people start getting tired of the same old superhero movies and explosions no longer give them the happy feels), they start demanding something with more substance and flavor and complexity (e.g. people actually like the new Joker). And then the classically trained folk look down on this because duh, this has already been done and you're raving about something we've known about and we've gotten over years ago (e.g. critics criticize the Joker for just being a rehash of Taxi Driver). 

And this is not just about music at all, some examples I can list off the top of my head: the rise of foodies, 

I guess this all fits into the theory of expert-layman dynamics, except we're talking about art and entertainment here and in this case the laymen are just as involved (typically in science there's no real "popular culture" around science. I mean there's pop science but that's a little different).