What is art?

Who is Waldemar Januszezak? Do you know? I don’t but have been watching the episodes of his latest series, ‘The Impressionists’. I am really impressed the way he presented the old masters. I particularly enjoyed the final episode. ‘Take a closer look at the last years of impressionism particularly the influence on and work of Seurat and Van Gogh’s time in Paris....”

The Impressionists are, as Waldemar Januszczak confessed at the beginning of his new series, "terribly popular, terribly familiar, terribly commercialised".
On his way to the hotel room from which Monet painted his famous views of the Thames, Januszczak communicates to you from behind a stack of bags and boxes, the fruits of an Impressionist shopping spree in London that had netted him Impressionist pencil cases, jigsaws, tote bags, chocolates and a memorably ghastly shirt. Dropping them to the floor (not his words), he wonders how it had come to this – the punks of the 19th century art scene reduced to mere decoration.Tolstoy once wrote that art must create a specific emotional link between artist and the audience, one that "infects" the viewer. Thus, real art requires the capacity to unite people via communication (clearness and genuineness are therefore crucial values). This aesthetic conception led Tolstoy to widen the criteria of what exactly a work of art is. He believed that the concept of art embraces any human activity in which one emitter, by means of external signs, transmits previously experienced feelings. Tolstoy even offered an example of this: a boy that has experienced fear after an encounter with a wolf later relates that experience, infecting the hearers and compelling them to feel the same fear that he had experienced—that is a perfect example of a work of art. As communication, this is good art, because it is clear, it is sincere, and it is singular (focused on one emotion). Tolstoy also believed that art that appeals to the upper class will feature emotions that are peculiar to the concerns of that class. Another problem with a great deal of art is that it reproduces past models, and so it is not properly rooted in a contemporary and sincere expression of the most enlightened cultural ideals of the artist's time and place. To cite one example, ancient Greek art extolled virtues of strength, masculinity, and heroism according to the values derived from its mythology. However, since Christianity does not embrace these values (and in some sense values the opposite, the meek and humble), Tolstoy believes that it is unfitting for people in his society to continue to embrace the Greek tradition of art.

“Art is life
The abstractness in art is
a beautiful illusion but not a lie!” (few lines from my poem, Art is life)

What is art to you?