My first impulse at this was to slam my fists on my keyboard and howl with rage.

Since that's totally unproductive and not an appropriate response to a sophisticated argument such as yours, I'll abstain.

I'd also like to acknowledge that at the end of my remarks, we're unlikely to agree fully. But I'm hoping I can demonstrate my perception of these phenomenon that you specify, my perception of your perception, and in that, why I think you're mistaken on a few fronts.

1. Your classical education failed you if you can't identify one of the most important reasons visual art has changed so much.

>I remember touring the Vatican museum... If you stop and look around, you see people from all over the planet, young and old, looking around jaws agape at some of the wonders.
Near the end of the tour you end up in a modern gallery. Most of it is devotional art, most of it looks like reassembled garbage and random tossings out of paint can. Nobody, not a person, stops and pays any attention to it. If you stop in these galleries and watch people as they move through it, the only sounds you hear are snickering and sighs as people try to escape the crushing irrelevance of it all.

I'll start by pointing out that I happily do stop at these galleries. Western visual culture was essentially devoted to cultivating photo-realism for centuries. Then the camera (and its derivatives) came into prominence and set off a powerful debate, primarily academic, about what the goal of visual art and its means should be. I think this controversy is a very interesting one and I enjoy watching it-- but you have to be aware of the controversy for a lot of it to make sense. I posit that we should teach it because it's part of our culture and has been for decades.

On a more personal note, a lot of modern art is trash in the way that a lot of pre-modern art was too. But a lot of it also speaks to me, and I don't appreciate what I interpret as your weirdly simultaneously faux-populist and faux-elitist suggestion that I'm being insulted.

2. I dispute your implicit claim that high art ever had that tremendous an audience. In raw terms, it's actually larger today than it was a hundred years ago-- think about the number of people we educate today versus then.

3. I'll quote you again:
>I found it troubling that as the liberal arts came into the modern age, I think they became more and more irrelevant to describing and enriching the world: philosophy, once a guide for humanity into the frontiers of law, ethics, science, has become a circus of irrelevant navel gazing; high-music became random and unpleasant fist slamming; literature because trite political regurgitation or stream-of-consciousness vomitus...

Which philosophers are you accusing of navel gazing? Perhaps we'll agree, perhaps not.

And who do you consider high-music? Again, perhaps we'll agree, perhaps not.

I perceive you as lamenting the decline of high art culture while simultaneously lashing out at people who do try to improve it with a vaguely populist criticism not well grounded in any historical-empirical data about popular art appreciation.

Post script, you can like pop and Bach at the same time and there's precisely nothing wrong with that.