Of course, it probably wouldn't do much to help me understand why they can count random smears on a canvas as "art"...
By way of reversing the ADBOC concept, I disagree denotationally but confirm your connotation. As you explain in the cousin several times removed post, many kinds of art are bullshit. Cultural preferences that would not be particularly likely to be rediscovered if all trace was removed. This differs from other forms of art which are more specifically directed at aesthetic preferences intrinsic to humans.
Of course, immersing yourself in a culture and experiencing the flow of status first hand is the perhaps the best way to get an intuitive anthropological understanding. I found, for example, that having done a research degree in a subfield of AI helps me understand how peer affiliation by persisting with researching silly ideas can be counted as 'science'.
Today I looked at the above illusion and thought, "Why do I keep thinking A and B are different colors? Obviously, something is wrong with how I am thinking about colors." I am being stupid when my I look at this illusion and I interpret the data in such a way to determine distinct colors. My expectations of reality and the information being transmitted and received are not lining up. If they were, the illusion wouldn't be an illusion.
The number 2 is prime; the number 6 is not. What about the number 1? Prime is defined as a natural number with exactly two divisors. 1 is an illusionary prime if you use a poor definition such as, "Prime is a number that is only divisible by itself and 1." Building on these bad assumptions could result in all sorts of weird results much like dividing by 0 can make it look like 2 = 1. What a tricky illusion!
An optical illusion is only bizarre if you are making a bad assumption about how your visual system is supposed to be working. It is a flaw in the Map, not the Territory. I should stop thinking that the visual system is reporting RGB style colors. It isn't. And, now that I know this, I am suddenly curious about what it is reporting. I have dropped a bad belief and am looking for a replacement. In this case, my visual system is distinguishing between something else entirely. Now that I have the right answer, this optical illusion should become as uninteresting as questioning whether 1 is prime. It should stop being weird, bizarre, and incredible. It merely highlights an obvious reality.
Addendum: This post was edited to fix a few problems and errors. If you are at all interested in more details behind the illusion presented here, there are a handful of excellent comments below.