Observations on today's audience's artistic priorites...

Just as the great dinosaurs of the Jurassic period evolved into benign sparrows, most music which was previously heralded as having paradigm shifting roles is now relegated to such menial tasks as occupying a queued customer's time while waiting for "tech support" or background for some high concept advertisement. How does this reflect on our cultural value system? If great and arguably immortal melodies have little other current role than as menial servants to the above-mentioned contexts, I submit that the final act of a cultural denouement may be at hand. A "rapture" of cultural appreciation, in which those who still appreciate the aesthetic importance of what is historically relevant on a musical level are still at liberty to rise above the maddening crowd, whose baser sensibilities prevent them from any higher expectations. Before you accuse me of having an artistically elitist m.o., consider that not so many years ago (let's say thirty, arbitrarily),one could make an assertion that people were willing to let their own curiosity alone guide them as to what was aesthetically relevant. Today, corporate entities have entrenched themselves as the "policemen" of what is to be given a viable market value (ergo artistic value), leaving consumers to act as willing sheep to be herded into the corral which assigns the value matching their own interest. This perceptual manipulation was decades in the making, and one could argue that for the time being, "the rabbit hole is closed". Only by re-evaluating our collective artistic priorities, can our identities as individual patrons of new and evolving art forms be reclaimed. It is our own laziness which allowed a faulty model of consumerism to corrupt our ability to discern what is aesthetically relevant.