Why are there so many abstract painters and serial composers but Finnegans Wake never generated much in the way of disciples or epigones?

your fricking dumb it takes 5 minutes to “understand” some abstract piece of art and create your own but you would have to actually read Wake and then jerk of for twenty years to write your own

Music and painting can exist perfectly well without a subject-matter, at least without any obvious or stated subject-matter. Painting of this kind is called “abstract.” Musicians used to distinguish between “program” music and “absolute” music. The latter term meant music without a literary text or any specific illustrative intention, that is to say, instrumental music of an introspective nature. Neither “abstract” painting nor “absolute” music is any “purer” than any other kind of painting or music, and no painter or musician ever pretends it is. It is merely more obscure. When painters speak of “purity of line,” they mean a complete lack of obscurity. When they speak of a “pure” color, they mean a shade that is unequivocal. Say an artist’s intentions are “pure,” if you must. That means he is not commercial-minded. The word pure cannot possibly have any meaning when applied to the content or structure of literature. Poetry could be pure only if it could be devoid of meaning, which it can’t. You can make nonsense poetry, certainly; you can dissociate and reassociate words. But you cannot take the meanings out of words; you simply can’t. You can only readjust their order. And nobody can or ever does write poetry without a subject.
What subjects, then, are available to the poet today? Practically none. Money, political events, heroism, science, mathematical logic, crime, the libido, the sexual variations, the limits of personality, the theory of revolution: the incidents of all these are more graphically recited by journalists, the principles better explained by specialists. There really isn’t much left for the heirs of Homer and Shakespeare to do but to add their case-histories to the documentation of introspective psychology by the practice of automatic writing. Highly trained in linguistics (though the philologists are not bad at that either) and wearing the mantle of the Great Tradition, admired unreasonably and feared not unreasonably (for they are desperate men), they still have, as poets, no civil status, no social function, no serious job to do, and no income.
They haven’t even any audience to speak of. For some time now they have been depending mainly on one another for applause. Hence the pretentiousness and the high intellectual tone of all they write. I mean that for fifty years poetry has mostly been read by other poets, and that for a good thirty years now has mostly been written to be read by other poets.