art, culture and language are increasingly becoming populist
Are they really? Before there were dictionaries for prescriptivists to refer to, language must've been pretty populist. When most of the population couldn't read the dictionaries, actual usage must've still determined whether or not something was accepted by others as a word. Art - weren't Shakespeare's plays written "for the masses"? Wasn't Mozart pretty much writing popular music in his time? I'm sure you can think of visual artists who did the same. It's only we who consider such stuff "art" and modern popular stuff "not art". In two hundred years what we consider "popular music" will have moved into the realm of "classical*" or "art" music. And the words and meanings that most people use will still be understood by most people, whether or not they've made it into a dictionary.
* by this I mean the popular definition of classical music, oh pickers-of-nits
