Just to make things interesting--let's throw in some Chinese

So a lot of the Helvetica documentary was talking about what type of message the font got across. Whether that message was corporate, stylish, or bland, the people in the documentary agreed that what font something is written in has an affect (however large or small) on its overall message. And being the East Asian Languages and Literature major that I am, I immdiately thought of Asian calligraphy. Since we learned how to add pictures into blog posts this week, let's see if I can manage.
example: Piece of work by the Chinese poet Mifu, image from Wikipedia.
So this is just a random example, but the point I want to make is that this is considered a piece of artwork. Calligraphy like this is up in museums next to paintings and the like. I'm interested in how this compares to Western calligraphy/typography, because if you wrote a poem in English in really nice letters, I don't think it would generally be considered artwork per say. You could have stylized letters as part of a bigger piece of artwork, but I don't think it would generally count as artwork in and of itself. Then again, most of the people in the documentary made their living working with typefaces, so it's obviously very important.
That brings up an interesting question of what's more important: the meaning of the words or the style in which they're written. If you take the two lines on the left side of the image, they're written in cursive script, and oftentimes a lot of Chinese people can't even read it. Yet it's still appreciated as artwork. I think it's interesting to consider.