Disclaimer: I'm not super into magic, and I don't know what David Copperfield's "flying" looks like.
I think probably it's just too similar looking to easier tricks. A magician/enthusiast can appreciate the craft of the trick and the difficulty in executing it, a naive audience member is probably just thinking "Well it's wires somehow, I just don't know how," which is less exciting than "Wait I genuinely have no idea what on earth is going on here I could have sworn that ball was somewhere else."
We see singers and acrobats and circus clowns "flying", and while I'm sure it's vastly less impressive to anyone that knows what's going on, from four-hundred feet away it just doesn't actually look all that different.
My other (very speculative) suspicion is that I think object permanence is a pretty old, primitive part of our brains. They've done studies showing toddlers, and even a lot of animals, get confused when you clearly demonstrate violations of object permanence (e.g. put a ball in a tube and have it come out the other end, then put in another identical ball and it doesn't come out). I suspect tricks that make an object disappear or transport or duplicate or some other seeming nonsense have an easier time having a big impact because they're legible enough to impress a dog, and an audience full of cocktails isn't that different from a dog, when you get down to it.
Edit: and you said levitating has long been a very popular illusion, so maybe this wasn't the case in the past; I would suggest maybe modern audiences are just more familiar with wires/stage "flight" from other performers, or even, like, The Matrix. But again, I'm speaking from no knowledge, just thinking.
> probably just thinking "Well it's wires somehow, I just don't know how,"
Yes, I agree this is likely a big component. It's interesting to ponder why "less pure" versions of levitation get bigger reactions. You can see Flying here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=112EIHu5gFc. What I like about the Flying illusion is that it is basically just a guy dangling on a wire. The artistry is in how Copperfield packages the presentation from the story-telling upfront to elevate the significance to the 'proof points' to eliminate audience suspicion like passing hoops over him and flying into a human sized glass fish tank with a lid (which each involve a lot of cleverness). It must've taken an enormous amount of practice to develop the body control that transforms it from "a guy dangling on a wire" to someone flying gracefully.
> object permanence is a pretty old, primitive part of our brains
Indeed. This is why close-up coin magic has always been my focus.
I think probably it's just too similar looking to easier tricks. A magician/enthusiast can appreciate the craft of the trick and the difficulty in executing it, a naive audience member is probably just thinking "Well it's wires somehow, I just don't know how," which is less exciting than "Wait I genuinely have no idea what on earth is going on here I could have sworn that ball was somewhere else."
We see singers and acrobats and circus clowns "flying", and while I'm sure it's vastly less impressive to anyone that knows what's going on, from four-hundred feet away it just doesn't actually look all that different.
My other (very speculative) suspicion is that I think object permanence is a pretty old, primitive part of our brains. They've done studies showing toddlers, and even a lot of animals, get confused when you clearly demonstrate violations of object permanence (e.g. put a ball in a tube and have it come out the other end, then put in another identical ball and it doesn't come out). I suspect tricks that make an object disappear or transport or duplicate or some other seeming nonsense have an easier time having a big impact because they're legible enough to impress a dog, and an audience full of cocktails isn't that different from a dog, when you get down to it.
Edit: and you said levitating has long been a very popular illusion, so maybe this wasn't the case in the past; I would suggest maybe modern audiences are just more familiar with wires/stage "flight" from other performers, or even, like, The Matrix. But again, I'm speaking from no knowledge, just thinking.