Oh my, I did enjoy that Clara! The notion that intellectual elitism is "un-American" is delicious ... shame on you, Harvard!
Only teasing ... actually I agree with you generally speaking. My point is to do with the way we perceive texts as distinct from pictures, hence my inverted commas around "art". Here's a nice piece of calligraphy from Bickham's "The British Monarchy or a New Chorographical Description of all the Dominions Subject to the King of Great Britain...":
I think it's fair to say that the way we interact with something like that is to read it, left to write and top to bottom. We absorb the words and only then - if we have an interest in calligraphy - do we notice the forms, texture and layout. Essentially it's a literary experience, certainly on first inspection.
Here's some more calligraphy:
That's another text, written in the infamously impenetrable Luxeuil miniscule. It is readable, but only with a lot of concentration and head scratching - so it's my contention that most non-paleographers will process it as an image rather than a text, and immediately focus on the overall aesthetic rather than literary attributes. (Incidentally, there's a school of thought that Luxeuil miniscule was never intended to be easily legible, but I digress). By the same token, if we're presented with a clearly written text in medieval dog Latin or Old High French, the tendency is to ignore the words and admire it as a work of art. Or "art" - after all it's a text which has become linguistically obscure to the average viewer.
Interesting that you should mention Earl Lupfer, the great all-rounder, who could turn his hand to everything from plain penmanship (text) to flourishing ("art"). One of the things he was noted for was the signature combination, which is somewhere in between: there's a good deal of fun to be had in trying to untangle the spaghetti and work out exactly what those initials are supposed to be (and how the heck he did it).
Some contemporary calligraphers and lettering artists seem to have been thinking along similar lines. I don't think it's appropriate to link directly to images, but
Thomas Ingmire and
Charles Pearce come readily to mind. What they do is undoubtedly calligraphic, but there's also a conscious subversion of the text, presumably to focus on the aesthetic. The old art / craft division probably plays into this.
I'm not making any value judgments here, just pointing to two different ways of seeing. I'm more a creature of libraries than art galleries, so I'm not about to do down the legibly written word. And for the record, I'll take the Ramones over Webern every single time.