Context

The more I visit art galleries and museums the more I'm convinced modern art is unfortunately all about context.  Or I should say the perceived value is all about context.  Not only economic value, but the artistic as well.  I recently attended an open night at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco to see the amazing cellist Zoe Keating (if you've never heard her, you need to today, here's a link).  After the show I wandered around the four floors of mixed art work with equally mixed emotions, sometimes cynical but mostly disappointment.  As an example of this, on the third floor I casually turned to my wife and cynically said "it's not a modern art gallery without a blank piece of paper taped to a wall" and sure enough the next room we went into had an entire wall of blank pieces of paper pinned to the wall.  This same floor also had two huge canvases painted solid color of blue, by different artists and located in different parts of the museum.  I had to read a lengthy explanation about the intention of the artist, which was full of funny ramblings about mans inability to focus attention on the structure of blah blah blah.  If a piece of artwork is required to have a multi-page explanation, perhaps the actual piece wasn't executed effectively.  In a rare interview J.D. Salinger gave regarding his seminal work Catcher in the Rye he was asked about the intentions of the main character Holden Crawfield, and Salinger curtly relied "read the book, it's all there, if I need to better explain my characters intention, I would have written the story differently...".  Perhaps that is why he was such a recluse, his artistic intentions are perfectly laid out in his books.  Maybe this isn't the best example because the written word is much easier to understand than the often confusing abstraction of modern visual art.  But if a piece of work is required to have a written explanation in order for its understanding, perhaps the explanation is what should be presented.  If these artworks were removed from the immaculate space of the museum and placed in an alleyway, would they hold the same esteem.  Blank pieces of paper taped to a wall anywhere else would be considered trash, but here it's art.