An essay on "understanding of art"

Hello,

Here is an essay on whether it's necessary for a piece of art to be understandable by most people in order to have merit. Could you please take a look? As usual, any critique is welcome.

Topic:

"In order for any work of art – whether film, literature, sculpture, or a song – to have merit, it must be understandable to most people."

Essay:

The topic introduces the idea that a piece of art is worthy honoring only if it is understandable to most people. To decide whether it is veritable, it should be analyzed for whom pieces of art are created, and what should a piece of art provide to its target audience to be characterized as worthy.

First, it worth mentioning, that some artists of past centuries, like Oscar Wilde, were proposing a principle of doing art only for art's sake. The essential idea of that principle is that the "true" art should not have any didactic or practical aims. This concept implies that a piece of art is created not for any particular group of consumers, and thus, have not to be understood by anyone except its creator, not to speak of the most people as the topic suggests.

The idea similar to the previous one is to practise art for creator's self-realization and for one's personal pleasure. For instance, a process of painting may be quite pleasant itself with no regards to whether it will lead to any significant result or how this result will be appraised by others. Even a short non-too-costly film may be created for the authors own pleasure.

However, many pieces of art are created for public appraisal, with purposes of enlightening target public, giving them a pleasure, and sometimes with commercial purposes. If a piece of art is exposed to public, then it should be somehow perceived by them. The term "understanding" suggested by the topic is not very clear when applied to art. It is speaking for itself in case of a piece of art that has the purpose of transmitting some useful information to its consumers, the purpose of enlightening. In that case, to understand means simply to get the information the author wanted the reader to obtain. For instance, a book with moral is worthless if moral is not understood. But, if providing moral is not the only purpose of this book, the book may be worthy. If the book's storyline is too sophisticated, so that it is hard to extract any moral from it, but, in the same time, this book describes some exciting events that provide a reader with a portion of vivid emotions, then such book may be valued by its readers. And that is despite the fact, that this book is not understandable by its readers in a way expected by the author. But in case of painting, understanding is rather to be interpreted as perceiving or experiencing. Understanding with its straightforward meaning is not the best way to perceive paintings. It is not necessarily should be understood what exactly is painted, with what purpose, and what provoked the author to create such a picture. It is quite enough if a painting awakens some positive emotions in people it is being exposed to. The same may be said about songs. It is not a rare case when a person enjoys a song written in a foreign language with absolutely no understanding of what this song is about. For example, in the twentieth century's eighties, a singer Joe Dassin was very popular in Russia, but, I believe, most people did not understand what Joe's songs are about. A person listening for a song should not necessarily get semantic meaning of song's words to receive some positive emotions from rhyme and music. In other words, in some cases understanding is not a mandatory component in the process of art comprehension.

The performed analysis results in a conclusion that to be considered worthy, a piece of art should not necessarily be understandable to most people, and in some cases, should not be understandable at all.

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Thanks in advance.

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Victor