I've been wanting to respond to this for days but didn't have the time. And I still don't, really--but a few thoughts. First of all, yes, popular entertainment has been steadily getting better. Or rather, there is more good popular entertainment. Television--there's some amazing, amazing work being done in TV, much better than in features. I don't think you can make a good case that feature films have gotten "better" -- you might be able to make the case that the average shitty comedy today is smarter than the average shitty comedy of twenty years ago (and the same goes for action movies or whatever else you want) but I don't think the best films of the last decade are better than the best films of the 1970s or 1940s. Or 1990s -- I don't think "best" is a bar that moves much, decade to decade (have the best novels gotten worse or better?). But it's possible the lower bound for films, or the average, or whatever, has been moving up, and undeniable the upper bound for American television has been moving up (though I think the latter is a function of money, not increasingly sophisticated filmmakers). If anyone had given Scorsese money to make a TV show in the 1970s it would probably have been amazing; the money just wasn't there yet. In any event, that's not something I'm unwilling to concede.

I think where we start to disagree is the idea that "the real value in a work lies in its ability to provoke a meaningful interpretation from the audience." More about that soon.