I find it interesting that in the Erica Lai thread and now starting in this one that a correlation is being drawn between understanding and appreciation.
First let me set the base for my argument - all photography is art! The art can be good, it can be bad, it can be meaningful or meaningless, it can be evocative it can be dull, just like all other forms of more traditional (and some not traditional) art, e.g. painting, music, etc - all these things are subjective anyway. Even holiday snapshots (please let's not go here again) I would consider art, albeit usually not very sophisticated, but art none the less - the images, put together form a series, a series tells a story, story telling is an art!
Regarding the Erica Lai images, personally they didn't work for me. Artistically and technically the images for the most part were fine. The problem I have is that I believe her intent was to tell a story with the various series of images. Any series of images automatically IMO is attempting tell a story (individual images can do this too, but multiple images lend themselves more to being interpreted as a story). In this regard I feel that Erica did not succeed, at least not for me. Whether she deserved to win the award or not I can't say because I didn't see the competition - maybe hers was certainly deserving compared to rest.
OK, just because I don't understand what she was trying to convey with her images, does not mean that I can not appreciate them.
Personal attacks (on the artist) aside, anyone who has a negative view of her work or an opinion of whether she should have received the award or not seems to be shouted down for not-understanding or apreciating her art - this is IMHO the height of hypocrisy - why is your view any more inspired or insighful then anyone elses, including the detractors.
If her artwork was designed to be emotive then I feel she has succeeded 110% - just look at the passion of the positive and negative arguments in the both these threads! If her artwork was designed to tell a story, then I feel she has failed. In all likelyhood she probably falls somewhere in between the two extremes.