Issue55求指导

dreamery88

55 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.(218)
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.

正文



The statement concentrates on the standard to distinguish whether the work of art could have merit. I concede that sometimes arts would be better to be understandable to most people, considering that the targets of art creation are people. However, the statement is to extreme if extended to any situation. In my opinion, most of the time arts have some other more significant evaluation criteria and in some specific situation they are not necessarily to be comprehensible to normal people.


Admittedly, the destination of art is to satisfy people’s demands on spiritual enjoyment. For this, the artists should carter the cognitive abilities of normal people and try to guarantee that they could also understand their works. After all, an abstruse work of art might be strange from the view of normal people and could hardly be accepted by them, even though it could be high in artistic value. The paintings by Van Goth, for example, could not be approbated by the contemporary people because normal people even artists could not fully understand Van Goth’s advancing idea and the meanings of his works. In this way, people treat them no more than unpleasant and strange wastes. Consequently, to achieve merits in temporary society, arts would be better to be accessible to most people.


However, emphasizing the accessibility of art to normal people does not indicate that we could neglect some other equally or more important criteria. Specifically, the artistic value of arts should be an inevitable concern to define a meritorious work of art. Sometimes, artists hold the most advanced artistic ideology and create some works that show high artistic value but exceed people’s cognitive capacities. These works of art could be considerably meritorious even though they could not be understood by most people. To substantiate this, we will look back to the example of Van Goth. Though contemporary people could not understand his artistic style of impressionism, his paintings are still considered as the most meritorious ones throughout human history. In fact, most of his paintings have been sold at an unbelievably high price in modern society. On the contrary, if we stress only on the accessibility of art to normal people, even the most ingenious artists would abnegate their original inspiration, as a result of which innumerous amount of outstanding works of art would dry before they are created. Under the most ideal situation, the art with both accessibility to normal people and artistic value would be meritorious. However, under conditions that the two aspects contradict each other, we should give superiority to the artistic value.


Further, there are some other situations under which people could enjoy the arts without perceiving their deep meaning and features from professional perspective. For some classical songs, sometimes normal people might not fully understand the complex emotions contained in the abstruse lyrics or the technical skills in controlling the songs. However, they could still feel impressed with the smooth and graceful melody. Under this situation, the melody could be enjoyed by the normal people while the other professional contents are left to specialist to explore and appreciate. In other words, this kind of songs could satisfy both the normal people and specialist. Therefore, by no means could we negate the merit of these works even though they are not so understandable by most people.


In summary, the artists would try to keep their works understood by most people. Nevertheless, never could they neglect some other more compelling criteria that define a meritorious work of art, for example the artistic value. Besides, under some specific situation, the arts could also content the most people even though people may not understand the deep meanings of these arts.

自我感觉
写了很久但还是感觉不清晰。
（1）反对原论点的两个原因（1.当大众化与其他更重要的标准矛盾时，应首先考虑其他更重要的标准。2、很多特别的情况下艺术不能完全被most people理解，但不妨碍most people去欣赏这些艺术）没有什么自然的衔接关系，就是两个独立的点。
（2）由于以上原因也不能提出一个简洁鲜明的一句话论点，论点就像是在重复下面的两个原因。
不知道大家是不是又相似的感觉，能不能给点意见呢？

普渡哥

立场不鲜明，不敢否定，也不敢肯定。

dreamery88

立场不鲜明，不敢否定，也不敢肯定。

-- by 会员 普渡哥 (2013/3/13 9:18:23)

多谢你的意见，打算从merit的定义角度来写一下。。。