Dug up this old interview with Steven Pinker (of Blank Slate fame) caried in edge.org.   Here he describes his take on the arts -

EDGE: Why do people still treat art and literary critics as the wisest and most relevant intellectuals? In terms of literature, why is it that in the leading cultural magazines, you can still find a lot more of Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and Bloomsbury, than discussions about the issues you and other scientists are raising?

PINKER: One reason for the canonization of artists is a quirk of our moral sense. Many studies show that that people hallucinate moral virtue in other people who are high in status—people who are good-looking, or powerful, or well-connected, or artistically or athletically talented. Status and virtue are cross-wired in the human brain. We see it in language, where words like "noble" and "ugly" have two meanings. "Noble" can mean high in status or morally virtuous; "ugly" can mean physically unattractive or morally despicable. The deification of Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. are obvious examples. I think this confusion leads intellectuals and artists themselves to believe that the elite arts and humanities are a kind of higher, exalted form of human endeavor. Anyone else having some claim to insights into the human condition is seen as a philistine, and possibly as immoral if they are seen as debunking the pretensions of those in the arts and the humanities.

Ah-ha!  So people unnaturally respect what Hollywood twits have to say because evo-psych has lodged a deep seated emotion in us that pretty people live in a "higher, exalted" plane.   I believe it.

I think a factor that compounds this is that many in the intellectual and pseudo-intellectual class also have a deep resentment / suspicion of capitalism.   Artistes and the like have the imputed nobleness that Pinker describes above coupled with perceived outsider status from the rapacious, economic machine.  Their opinions are driven by an incorruptible aesthetic purity vs. the fatally-flawed, goldfish in a bowl perspective the rest of us have.  They're opinion is authentic and true.  We're parochial and biased by having to work for da man.