Why is Modern Dance Undervalued in Society?

Many modern dancers today find themselves dismayed at the lack of appreciation there is on the part of audiences for modern dance, a recent article in The Huffington Post is a pretty typical summary of this feeling on the part of dancers as well as an attempt to defend modern dance as an art form. The problem with these complaints is not so much that they don't successfully defend modern dance, it's just that modern dance is more or less still pretty avant-garde, especially for the average person. The cultural complaint that people "are afraid of modern dance because it's not evident what it's about, or what you're supposed to get walking away from it," is not a helpful one, nor is assuring audiences it's okay that they don't know what it's about and the joy about it comes from trying to figure it out. None of that is going to change the fact that people generally don't enjoy what they don't understand. The enjoyment which comes from the "higher" artforms are not evident at the first glance, but overtime people came to enjoy Classical and Romantic artforms more as they learned more about them and more people appreciated them. The fact is that the avant-garde or the close to avant-garde artforms are only going to be appreciated by a small section of society until those artforms begin to seep into the minds of the rest of audiences. And the other fact is is that most avant-garde works aren't very good either. I would estimate (very loosely) that 70-90% of works created today are not very good works of art. But this was true in the 1700s and the 1800s as well, it was also true that the general population did not like them very much either. Think about all the stories of great artists who were derided during their lifetime: Vincent Van Gogh, Ludwig Van Beethoven, William Blake, etc. It is just simply the nature of cutting-edge, not-for-the-purpose-of-entertainment art-forms. So stop complaining about society's failures of appreciating your work, because you chose to do the work. If you didn't want to be looked down upon or not appreciated to what you think you deserve, then you shouldn't be in an artform that's only been around a 100 years.