The obfuscated C contest is very explicitly by and for C programmers - the layman isn't expected to know about it, much less have a positive opinion of it.
Who's expecting the layman to have an understanding and a positive opinion of everything that turns up in museums and galleries? Not the artists or the curators, surely.
If anything, the only problem I see here is the reverse: Laymen are expecting that all those things should be instantly accessible to them with no work.
