It was mildly entertaining, but is this really what art has come to?
DZH22: I'm finding it difficult to disagree with you. Really difficult.
I think the reason that museums have been creating/building contemporary art collections in recent years (the Metropolitan in New York is the first one that leaps to mind after the MFA) is that contemporary art is popular with two particular sets of people (and not many others): art critics and the mega-rich.
As a curator, the former, obviously, flatter you for being is "daring" and taking a bet on the hamper full of dirty gym socks from a "relative unknown" like DZH22. The art critic has his own interest: he spends a few hours writing a piece that allows him to establish himself as having a perceptive eye and being on the cutting edge if collectors or other curators decide (potentially based on the critic's article) that DZH22 is, in fact, a daring new artist of merit. For the critic, it's possibly higher risk, but also higher payout, than covering well-trod ground and writing about a Renoir or Assyrian bas-relief exhibition. So contemporary art allows curators and critics to see themselves as swashbuckling avant-gardists, regardless of the artistic merit of the hamper of gym socks. For its part, the museum, of course, gets publicity out of that publicity, which any museum wants.
Meanwhile, the mega-rich have found that there's much more supply of Damien Hirst works -- and that the artist attracts a flashier set -- than, say, Tang Dynasty pottery. Given that nearly endless supply, there can be a lot more (sexy) auctions of bedazzled chimp skulls and a great many more opportunities for you to attract attention and envy by buying said skull. In other words, the mega-rich (and some of them don't have great taste in art, in case you didn't know) have incentive to prefer contemporary art to, say, Dutch Masters. That contemporary art fuels a massive industry of galleries, auctions ... and all the parties, coke, and ego-stoking that go with it. For their part, museums survive (or at least grow fat) on donations from really wealthy people. Heck, if any of us could pull million-dollar donations off, we would too. But as a result, museums are pressured by donors who like contemporary art to boost their holdings of contemporary art (perhaps even their holdings of works by contemporary artists that the donors and trustees themselves collect ... imagine how much more valuable your Hirst gilded goatnads would be if featured at the MFA!). And if you're a museum today, your donors and trustees are the golden goose you don't want to upset.
In a word, it's a business. I'm on board with you in thinking that the vast, vast majority of contemporary art is atrocious and has no place at the MFA. (And, besides, we have an expensive ICA for that, in addition to MassMoCA, but nowhere else to see the art that has actually mattered/inspired throughout history.) Unfortunately, the MFA will have an incentive to beef up its Damien Hirst sequined octopus legs at the expense of Attic sculpture as long as the donors/trustees themselves are collecting the octopus legs. And they're likely to do that as long as doing so is, well, easier than collecting Attic sculpture. And as a function of time, loss, and the need to keep Damien Hirst's workshop profitable, that's unlikely to change. The only thing that may change it is that the welling backlash of a public ever-more skeptical of contemporary art may finally cause the entire bubble to burst ... but I don't know whether that public matters much to the inward-looking curators, collectors and academics.
But, hey, at least the groups of elementary schoolkids will probably find the contemporary art more accessible (or at least achievable), right?