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Then philistine am I. To Scott's point, the background of the work cannot modify the experience of a blind sampler, and so it cannot reliably impact the experience of consumers in the future when the background or context may be lost or warped. Or even now when the seller can just lie about the background. The work is as good or bad as it is with zero context. Sure, you can use the context (assuming you trust it is accurate) to predict salient facts about it, but that is not the same as those facts being modified by or dependent upon the context. The structure of a book is perceivable "blind" so it can easily be considered - it is part of the work. The vintage of some wine? No. The author is dead. Embrace that and don't fool yourself into disbelieving your own senses because of the prestige of the thing. Does it have desirable quality A, or not? If you don't like a passage of Shakespeare given to you unlabeled (and you didn't recognize it), then you ought not like it in the alternate setting where you're told the author. All else is pretentious hogwash.
Scott is right - there is a bare, brute fact of sensory pleasure, and training yourself to override it, while possible, doesn't make it go away. Angelus Novus evokes no sensory pleasure. Any pleasure I could imagine derivable must come from appreciating context and hence, is not attributable to the work itself. There is separately, a 'work' of situating a work in a context, of creating a work within a context, and the quality of the two may differ drastically. "Fountain" is a terribly low quality work. While the 'work' of getting it displayed amongst fine art is perhaps an enjoyable thing, it does not make the actual object any more appealing. Decouple. Always decouple.
You'd have to do an analysis of what counts as 'the background of the work' to determine if this is true. If I am recruited as a blind sampler in a trial but not mind-wiped first, my experience of other art or the subject of the novel is still going to have massive impact on whether I like it or not. I may not enjoy certain historical novels if I start from zero knowledge of the relevant bit of history, but is that really an indictment of the novels? If I were a caveman I expect I'd be totally bowled over by the most rudimentary drawings, but so what?
Ultimately the question is who is a blind sampler? I feel like Scott is imagining a child with uncultivated tastes, and supposing that such a child lives inside all of us. I guess this is what you are talking about above when you mention 'a bare, brute fact of sensory pleasure'. To me that seems obviously falsified by facts such as e.g. I liked very sweet desserts once and now I find them sickly. It seems to imply an 'accumulative' model of how people grow (each layer of the self stays the same but we add on layers as we gain experience) that is very contrary to my intuitive sense of myself or others.
Then again it's the strength of intuitions here that makes it such a debated topic.
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