Windmill fashions

One thing I find strange is the NIMBY-ism surrounding wind farms. People will swear up and down that they care about the environment, are recycling their garbage, etc., but as soon as some utility company wants to put one of those new-fangled twirlygigs on yonder hill to generate electricity, watch out. There's a hue and cry from the local populace and all the old bromides about bird-migration patterns and unspecified illnesses are used in protest against the new windmills. The local municipal or regional government gets dragged into an interminable series of public meetings, and compromises are made all around. Although people like the concept of green energy, I think they have simply decided that windmills do not fit with their vision of what the countryside should look like, and are therefore ugly. A local example of this is Wolfe island, near Kingston.

Claude Monet - Tulip fields with Windmill

And yet these same folks think that windmills of the old Dutch variety are pretty. Art collectors pay millions for Van Gogh's paintings of windmills. Even contemporary artists make a living painting bucolic scenes of ye olde windmille:

Peter Oldale - Windmill

Why the dichotomy? Why is it that old windmills are seen as more pastoral/rural/traditional/quaint, while new windmills are seen as techno-wizardry that is at odds with a "green" lifestyle? This is strange because high-tech and eco-conciousness are not at odds. The Toyota Prius is coveted by many who seek a "greener" lifestyle, and that is a highly complex product of 21st-century technology. Nobody shuns hybrid cars because they don't look like carriages, so why not view the modern windmill as equally picturesque as the impressionists did theirs?

Is this really so hideous?