This could have been written at any point after the 1850s or so.

Indeed. Once galleries became significant buyers of art, scandalous art became an attractive thing to produce: it commanded outsized attention.

The dynamics are similar in Twitter today, too.

1850? I wager we could go all the way back if we tried.

> (…) the Italian artist and writer Giorgio Vasari,who used it as early as 1530, calling Gothic art a "monstrous and barbarous" "disorder".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_art