What is art?

This timeless questions haunts every artist, aesthetic, and creative process. Is it the process itself? The emotion when the artist is creating? Is it the emotion evoked when the "art" is finished? The viewer's vision? The artist's vision?

Plato.

felt that art is imitation, therefore...bad.

Aristotle.

felt that art is imitation, therefore...good.

Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? 1898.

Art is that human activity which consists in one human consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he has experienced, and in others being affected by those feelings and also experiencing them.

So what does this mean?

Philosophers, artists, scientists, normal people, all argue constantly about how to define art.

So is this art? >

Fountain by Marcel

Duchamp

if it is...is this Death of Cleopatra - Jean Andre Rixens, also art?

Can the two be compared on

the same aesthetic principles?

ponder.

art is emotion, expressed. - lost girl