The edge goes beyond.

Most people have a negative point of view when it comes to vanguardist art. It's inaccessible, too idiosyncratic, too particular. It's not even art, many will say.
But if you give it some thought, you'll realize that those people on the edge are the ones that feed the other ones, who will feed others that will finally make the message accessible. It's an industrial process, basically.
I'll give an example. Unfortunately, I have missed the screening of the documentary "Kill Your Idols", and since they still don't have any form of official distribution, I guess I got "hosed" (thanks my baby, for da vocab).
But from what I heard, the film is about a linneage of punk rock about which I've been reading a lot lately, known as No Wave, and the whole generation of "noise rock" that came afterwards, in the eighties, including Sonic Youth and Swans. Regardless of individual bios, which I don't know much about, the No Wave people were basically experimental kids, giving birth to a type of punk rock that was raw and barely musical, but richly artistic. I have downloaded "Teenage Jesus & The Freaks" (one of the bands from the period, in which Lydia Lunch, interviewed on the film, was a singer) and it's like walking around a museum.
It's beautiful, true, spontanous art. Noise is laid out in pure disorder, in the deepest human disorder. Lyrics don't rhyme, in fact, they were yelled instead of sung, which turns them into Lou-Reedean poems more than anything. Lack of organization. Dirt. Noise. That is Teenage Jesus.
I know I'm tripping, but I do have a point. After those people went absolutely nuts, stretching the boundaries of musical instruments so far that they turn into noise rather than music, it allowed other artists, such as Sonic Youth, and many years later, the Pixies, Pavement and so many others, to sew together all the noise and turn it into music. And after the Pixies, billions of other bands spawned, including the ever-so-popular Nirvana, which finally brought noise to the masses.
So bitch all you want kids, but if it wasn't for the inaccessible, elitist, daring artists, there wouldn't be much innovation. And the rule works for any other kind of technological development.