Art as a Cultural Common Denominator

I've always believed that I can appreciate the essence of something as Art without truly appreciating the work itself. For example, I do not particularly enjoy opera. However, on an intellectual level, I can understand the underlying creativity and talent involved in the medium. I would, however, be hard-pressed to tell good opera from bad opera or a good performance from a bad one. So, in a general sense, I believe Art can be a universal language. In a specific sense, though, I think it is a more complex issue.
As I read Ellen Dissanayake's "What is Art For?", I became more and more intrigued by the question. If you accept the theory of evolution as valid and the concept of survival of the fittest as reasonable, then Dissanayake's study of Art from an evolutionary viewpoint is enlightening. While I found her arguments around the importance of Art in ritual compelling, the concept I found most interesting came late in the book.
"As ethologists we should be concerned with charting what happens when a species leaves the environment for which it was adapted for another one which it then tries to adapt to its own ends." (Dissanayake, p.169)
(Throughout her text, Dissanayake repeats that terminology used should not imply value judgement. I also am not making any value judgement when I use terms such as civilization, native, primitive, culture, etc.) The quoted statement illustrates one of the main problems people in Western cultures face when trying to understand and appreciate Art from primitive cultures. First, it is fairly easy to see how Western Art forms played a role in ritual, especially if you were raised, as I was, in a Christian tradition. However, this form of Art was generally limited to paintings, statues, symbolic objects and vocal forms. Other forms of Art used in ritual in other non-Western cultures such as movement and body art, are less well understood and not always considered Art. As Dissanayake points out, many primitive cultures do not make a distinction between Art and Ritual and Life. While I think it is intellectually possible to make the leap of understanding of this connection, I also think it is difficult to truly appreciate the perspective. I'm not sure there is a translation process that would work to gain a deep, empathic understanding of how another culture thinks - about Art or much else for that matter.
There are certainly shared experiences between cultures, birth being, in my opinion, one of the two most universal, but perhaps the least "experienced". Death, on the other hand, is universal, but it is the end and an experience that cannot be relayed to others. I am not considering near-death experiences in this definition because it is hardly universal. I believe it is the other generally universal experiences that give us the most benefit when attempting to relate or understand Art from other cultures. Actually, I will amend that. It is the experience of emotions that I believe are generally universal - joy, sadness, elation, anger to name a few. These emotions give us the capacity to appreciate art from other cultures even if we cannot fully comprehend it.