Philip Ball reviews a David Stubbs book which tries to answer the question why contemporary avant-garde music is less accepted by the public than contemporary avant-garde art. He hits what I think is a very important factor:

Many musicologists accept a definition of music as “organised sound.” Yet sound is structured into music not on paper, nor even in the mind of the composer, but in the mind of the listener. Music is sound in which the organisation must be audibly perceptible to a listener, not just theoretically present. . .

The composer’s job is to manipulate the expectations that these principles produce—enough to avoid predictability and create a lively musical surface, but not so much as to lose coherence. Out of the interplay between expectation and reality comes much of music’s capacity to excite and move us. But what happens if these rules are undermined?

I agree that this is probably the most important factor but I think that bad music is more obnoxious than bad visual art also for another reason. It requires the production of energy to create soundwaves in the air (even if the music is unamplified and the energy comes from human muscles), so music is a more "active" art than painting or sculpture which only passively reflect light. In that sense music is more like a video or a light installation, except that the soundwaves will fill the entire air - unlike the lightwaves from a video screen which one can quickly and easily look away from. Add to that the duration of musical works, and you've got something which hurls physical energy at you, comes at you from all angles, and you can only escape it by leaving the concert hall or staying until the end. If you wanted to design an effective method of irritating people, that would be pretty good. No wonder the US government uses music to annoy suspected terrorists but as far as I know hasn't tried using really bad paintings.

A painting that really sucks is only moderately annoying; a video that sucks a little more so. For visual art to reach the obnoxiousness levels of really lousy music is possible - a room with shifting lights blaring from all its surfaces, for example - but fortunately rare. I don't think contemporary composers are really any worse than contemporary painters, but the nature of their work makes it less likely people will put up with their crappy products.

HT: Arts and Letters Daily