We must remember the frame of reference for these works. The audience. Most art, and certainly most paintings, movies, and most of Bach's work, is written for

We must remember the frame of reference for these works. The audience. Most art, and certainly most paintings, movies, and most of Bach's work, is written for a general audience. Works of advanced, pure math however are written for a very specialized audience, purposefully. This does not mean, though, that math cannot be written for a general audience and be understandable or even "beautiful". As an example, Cantor's diagnolization is understandable by a 10 year old. The profoundness of the question it asks is also understandable, as is its initially seemingly mind-bending inscrutability. What's more the solution and the logic of the proof are perfectly understandable and some of the easiest to understand explanations literally use a child's method of counting (mapping fingers to numbers). This is a beautiful work of math. And much math could be written for broader consumption. It's not done frequently only because that isn't the task most mathematicians set themselves to. Moreover, even outside the actual proof, many math results can be described in understandable and even beautiful ways. And the derivative results of mathematical discoveries are often easy to describe, understand, and appreciate as impactful and beautiful. So, I think this is a function of choice and focus. Perhaps math could indeed more popular if greater efforts were made here, but mathematicians as a group on the whole haven't set out to popularize it. Now, no matter how much effort is applied, math will probably never quite be as enjoyable to most people as music or movies. But with such efforts math may be more appreciable to a wider audience, as say paintings or poetry are.