Not talking "gallery pretensions" here, but asking if real details about the artist's life are really a necessary precondition to the appreciation of the art?
The way I look at it, it's not a precondition, but then calculus isn't a precondition for investigating (or enjoying) physics. They're distinct kinds of appreciation and analysis.
One of the "games" I enjoy with fiction (and political writing across the spectrum), for example, is following the...for lack of a better term, the "currency of ideas." To me, it's interesting to see the serious similarity of Superman to John Carter, John Carter to Lt. Gullivar, Lt. Gullivar to...I forget, but it's a Civil War era Dime Novel where a soldier finds a lost valley where the low gravity grants him amazing powers. It might not be a direct lineage, but there was probably some influence from one step to the next, and that's something that interests me greatly.
For others, it's not the expression of ideas itself, but the reason for the expression that interests them. To give another prose example (because I stink with visual art), Frankenstein reads as a much more interesting story to me after learning that the good doctor is largely based on Percy. It takes on more layers when you read St. Leon, her mother's (it may have been her father, I'm working from memory and need to run to work shortly) sprawling story about a frustrated superman.
Which isn't to say that it's not an entertaining work by itself, studyable and tractable to analysis. It's more that other avenues of inquiry open when you have more information.
Getting back to the physics analogy, I guess it goes back to the question of whether a rainbow is still beautiful after you learn that it's "just" refraction of light. For some people, it kills the illusion, while for others, it's much more interesting than it was before. I'm on the borderline, myself. I don't care about most artists, but can see where certain information can help the appreciation.
