Sorry to continue on a long deceased thread. Sorry to chime in at all, in fact, but my fingers keep typing.

I look at a sculpture and I say "Wow, that is one stunning sculpture."

As I'm looking, I hear a historian explaining the significance of the subject, the history of the sculptor and a few interesting tidbits of information describing both the subject's and the sculptor's lives at the time that the piece was actually produced.

It's all extremely interesting and I'm very happy to have learned all of this, because it certainly does create an understanding, of certain aspects of the work, that I didn't have before.

But when it's all been said and done, I still look at the sculpture and say "Wow, that is one stunning sculpture."

The work speaks for itself.