I'll grant that all art, insofar as it needs a creator, needs at least an audience of one. But:

If no one is viewing it as an access point to "beauty", then I don't think it's potent. If no one is looking at it, then what does the creator's skill matter? It's not as if ability is the only factor in popularizing a work, or making it accessible.

We're gonna have to agree to disagree on this note. The reason that the old tree/forest/sound adage sticks around is that it's not so easily answered. You think the tree doesn't make a sound, I think it does. Not sure how to reconcile that.

However: even if I granted you that an artwork needs an audience to be considered art (Was Emily Dickinson's poetry art before it came out of her drawer, by the way? Is it any less impressive for using such delineated and now-overused meter?), it doesn't at all necessarily follow that the audience's regard or understanding is what dictates potency. In fact, there's plenty of art whose value is hotly contested- painting of the Madonna made out of elephant shit comes to mind, as does Warhol's soup can, as does anything Norman Rockwell ever made. People can't agree on the value or power of these pieces, but they'll argue to the ends of the earth about them. In this case, isn't the fact that a work evokes any kind of strong, sustained response at all a testament to its power? And if an audience can't exactly pinpoint the source of a piece's power, but recognizes that it's there- what does that mean for your assertion that we have to understand a work completely (i.e. in the mother language) before it's truly powerful?

Which gets to your kissing analogy. I agree- we can't, after kissing the same girl, assert that we had the same kiss. But in kissing her, and in having that conversation, we're still agreeing on a fair number of premises- what a kiss is, what, generally, the emotional context of a kiss might be, why we'd be talking about it in the first place. If it seems like now I'm just building semantic sandcastles, consider: the Old Testament, right? Incredible work of art, if nothing else. And that "if nothing else" is the point- people have been arguing about the specifics of the Old Testament since, what, its conception? What each verse means, how it ought to be applied, who wrote which line, how many times has it been revised and in how many languages. Whether it's true or imagined or what have you. But despite all the authors and all the revisions and all the translations- despite not being able to agree on whether or not we had the same kiss- the CORE of the Old Testament remains intact- a conversation about spirituality, ethics, politics, a struggle to find higher meaning. These basic values are what help make the Old Testament so powerful, alongside all of the linguistic tricks. Despite the linguistic tricks. Good art is potent on a much more fundamental level than you're asserting for the sake of this argument. We don't have to have exactly the same kiss. We just need to go out and kiss, and then talk about how great, or how unsatisfying, kissing might be.

And lastly, regarding The Odyssey- I agree! Homer is a good example. But it wasn't a cheap shot. In fact, it was a great example exactly because of the way The Odyssey came about. The Odyssey isn't just a great work because of its driving concepts and their continued validity in modern times. The Odyssey is also a great piece of craftwork. It anticipates, pre-empts cultural change, so that the further it gets kicked forward, the more its shape adapts to modern convention. It's survived millennia, countless re-tellings and adaptations. It's jumped across media, and still, people appreciate it. That mutability is written into its form, just as important and impressive as the messages it conveys.

How does this apply to your argument? Well, I'd say that when you insist on either perfect cultural translation or else inevitable decay in potency, you're taking an incredibly narrow view of what makes an artwork, any artwork, painted or spoken or sung, "potent." It's not just the words. It's not even necessarily a clearly-delineated perfect idea at the core of the words (although that, I'd argue, is a lot of what makes a lot of art great). It can be as simple as the format that those words are put into. An oral tradition that allows the edges of a piece to soften with time and in so doing adapt perfectly to future cultures. Does it matter that we have every word down perfectly? No. It's enough that the form survives intact and vibrant as ever.

So no, I just can't agree that the audience is what gives a work of art its power, and that true appreciation requires perfect cultural translation, and that as soon as an audience deems a work trite or simple, then the work's power is gone. Much more likely that the audience is just too lazy or too assured in their cultural supremacy to look deeply enough into the work.