A lot of art is part of some sort of conversation that those in the know had, and so it makes sense to them, but those outside that scene have no idea.

What I think is particularly confusing about art is that in other disciplines, you pretty much never see such things exhibited to the public. Eg, take Perl poetry for instance:

    # The Cow
    #    by Ogden Nash
    #
    # The cow is of the bovine ilk;
    # One end is moo, the other, milk.
    #
    package cow;
    @ISA = qw(bovine);
    push @cow, 'moo';
    unshift @cow, 'milk';

Now imagine somebody framed that and hung it in a museum and normal people trying to understand what is this all about.