Maybe it is outside of the scope of this article, dealing with current pop culture, but it would have been nice to have some consideration of the fact that for the vast majority of the last 2000 years, almost all great art and music was commissioned by the Catholic Church or by others requesting that it contain a religious message. How did Michaelangelo and Handel create such great, Christian inspired are while today we are faced with Creed and WWJD?

Maybe it's because the church had a lot more control over culture in the past. I don't remember much about European history, so I don't know how well this applies to the time periods of Handel and Michelangelo, but in most Western countries churches hold significantly less power now than they did in the past, so people are more free to create their own art.

It's a difference of both market and control.

Who was paying Michaelangelo et al. for those awesome sculptures and paintings? The secular and religious nobles. Typically, today's super rich don't commission religious works and churches don't have the money to commission that level of art. (Most are either struggling to make the budget, putting the money into "real" church work, or paying off sex abuse victims.)

Handel was out to get paid too. He wrote operas, but the church forbid operas during Lent. Religous works were permitted to be performed, hence Messiah.

Christian artists may be Christians, but they are also people who need money to live. Since they no longer have religious patrons, they have to sell to the masses and anything sold to the masses is going to be of less quality and less challenging than that sold to conessiours.

I would argue that your assertion that "all great art and music" was commissioned by the Catholic Church is false. However, for a long time within that 2000 year span, the Catholic Church did dominate in terms of art and music, although so did many courts and nobles who kept artists and musicians in their households, commissioning the works from them as they would any other servant. Only instead of cleaning linens and making beds, these servants made the pieces of art that adorned walls.

The primary difference between that period and now, though, is a capitalist society and free market economy. A feudal society and economy concentrated wealth in one area (nobility and the Church), and also viewed art and music as an acquired skill, much like masonry or carpentry, rather than a transcendent talent. Art was not produced or available for the masses, only the wealthy, therefore it WASN'T mass produced or meant for mass audiences. Moreover, art was required to be ONLY for the glory of God -- other art work was sinful. The Church regulated art in the same way it regulated everything else, and is not far from attempts to censor and regulate art today (although today, arguably, there is much more debate over what qualifies as "art" and what is just offensive trash.)

I would argue that it has been many hundreds of years, though, since the Catholic Church has had the kind of power and clout to regulate art as an industry, or moreover since the best works of art have been paid for by the Church or even geared toward promoting a message of godliness. Certainly there isn't anyone putting up artists in their homes, commissioning great works for their halls or to dedicate to churches, etc. The great artists of the 19th and 20th centuries were largely people who were completely outside of society, who lived "sinful" lives and did not create works of art for the glory of God by the greatest stretches of the imagination. For the most part, they also railed against mainstream and certainly wealthy society.

How art is made and produced, the economy in which it is produce and consumed, is completely different now than it was 1000 years ago. How can it be at all surprising when the Church, or any church, is unable to commission great works, when by and large, most "artists" today work outside of mainstream, and especially religious, industries?