Why should it be that lower or applied arts like package design and advertising illustration wield so much clout in contemporary society, and the higher or fine arts are in such desperate straits?  There is reason to believe that the dichotomy itself may contribute substantially to the problem.

At one time, serious artists typically tried to reach and move as many of us as possible.  As an example, Michelangelo's David is said to have earned the gratitude of virtually the entire city of Florence, for so eloquently representing the city's sense of itself as a beautiful and vital emerging presence, unintimidated by the larger established entities surrounding it.   It probably would not have occurred to Michelangelo's contemporaries to deride David as being too "commercial" because of the breadth of this acceptance.

Today, by contrast, a notion has become common in the arts that being popularly accepted and hence "commercial" means being insubstantial.  Over the years, in response to being consistently ignored or overlooked by the culture at large, many serious artists have learned to make a kind of virtue of adversity, eventually coming to regard lack of recognition as almost prima facie evidence of having substance or depth.  

Unfortunately, in addition to reducing conscientious artists' confidence in their ability to reach the public at large, this attitude has also proved all too easy for poseurs to copy.   As a result, a whole subset of artists of varying degrees of talent now tie their claims to significance more or less directly to their obscurity.

This creates a culture primed to believe that serious art is supposed to be arcane;  where status accrues to those viewers and patrons who are hip or astute enough to "get it."  We therefore end up with an art world whose upper strata crank out the kinds of odd works that Morley Safer likes to poke fun at on 60 Minutes—ones for which the surrounding explanatory spiel has come to be at least as important as the art object itself.   And at the same time that these "credentials" of obscurity have been co-opted, artists of genuine ability and commitment continue to be shoved aside and disregarded.

We need to come back to a realization that although more subtle viewpoints are harder to convey to the general public, this does not mean that what is subtle absolutely can never be conveyed.  We also need to recall that failure on the part of the general public to get one's point is not a conclusive indicator that one has attained the sublime. 

Some works are just plain obscure;   others are sophisticated as well as accessible.  We need to remind ourselves that it represents neither shallowness nor crass commercialism to strive for the latter.