In order for any work of art—for example, a film, a novel, a poem, or a song—to have merit, it must be understandable to most people.

To understand the arts, means to perceive the intended meaning of it. While some forms of art interact with their observers due to the meaning of what expressed in that form of art, like the works of literature, the other kinds of art are not necessarily tied to the interpretation of the meaning of the art to have merits.

To begin with, the merit of the arts is not exclusively depended on being understandable to the most people. The effect of art is conveyed via many different ways, and only one of them is via understanding. Think about Celine Dion. Her singing is not understandable by those who do not know what she sings with French lyrics. Here, other factors carry the merit of her art like the impressive aural impacts. She can impress people’s emotions directly without the need of perceiving her words. Hence, we see that there are some forms of art denying the claim that their merits is incumbent upon being understandable.

However, when it comes to some certain forms of arts, especially the branches of literature, works need essentially to be understood to have any artistic merit. In reading a poem, the reader needs to understand the concept of the poem to be influenced. In a novel, the reader needs to follow the arrangement of the meanings of words in order to portray the plot and vicariously live through the characters of the novel to be affected by that work. All the artists of literature such as Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, Saadi Shirazi and so on, could not have been admired throughout the centuries as the great artists unless what they conceived were understandable works.

Finally, we should keep in mind that, besides understandability, it is also the observation of several other criteria that merits an artistic work. First, it should provoke the sense of beauty in the people; for instance, no matter how much a prose is understandable, only when it manifests some sorts of aesthetic values it verges to be an artistic work. Another standard should be met is the nobility of the work. If it has nothing new to say, again it cannot be categorized among the merited works. The arts also should have some didactic features; we cannot deny that the arts have a duty to elevate people’s taste and the way they look to the world. Therefore, for an art to be merited, there is a comprehensive set of standards that should be met by any work, and only one of the standards can be understandability.

In short, one of the standards that some artistic work should have is being understandability. However, all forms of art do not need to be understood to influence the others. Furthermore, there also many other respects that a work should manifest in order to be a merited artistic work.