Writing Instruct:

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

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.

Article:

In business world, the definition of a product's "merit" is definitely whether it's valuable or usable to most people. A product, for example, an iPhone or a Fort car, that provides facilitation and values to most people, realizes its merit through making plenty of profit from its consumers. However, this definition of "merit" dose not completely make sense when we are evaluating a piece of art.
Indeed, if a piece of art, say, a song, is understandable to most people, it will have great merit through multiple dimensions including the magnitude of population it influences, the business revenue it can generate, the sensation and consequential discussions it causes, etc. All these dimensions should be considered with regard to a art's merit.
However, we can not narrow our evaluation criteria only to these obvious dimensions. Otherwise, plenty of great art works will be ignored and the development of art will be retarded.
In most time, art is the expression of the artist's personal feelings or understandings about the world. Through art, artists demonstrate the world in their eyes to us, and it's just the diversity and mysteriousness or other people's world that makes our own world more complete and our life colorful. Besides, different people with different background, experiences and culture always has different understanding width and depth towards the same piece of art. A traditional Chinese poem will be much harder for an American to understand but will rouse emotion cords in most Chinese' hearts. If an artist cares too much about how the other people understand the world, either he/she can only create general and ordinary works or he/she can never find the universal answer and thus can never start creation. Further more, some arts' merit, especially the most great ones, can never be recognized until decades past because their perspectives are too ahead of the time in which he/she is living. Vincent Fango is one example.
Art is destined to be unique, not only to the artist who create it. but also to the spectacular who relish it. Diversity and uniqueness, even not understandable, is one significant dimension for the evaluation of an art's merit.