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Notes -
Every year on my birthday, I eat a delicious piece of salted caramel cheesecake, as a treat. It’s pure sugar and fat, an indulgence of atavistic hungers programmed in me by evolution. It’s orgasmically delicious in the moment, but also terrible for me, which is why I do it once a year. Is there intellectual content in my consumption of the cheesecake? Does it “produce a change in me”? Is the cheesecake art? It is a physical artifact produced by hand by a human being, with the intention of generating an emotional/aesthetic experience in the consumer. Like a classical symphony, it produces a transitory, evanescent sense of elation in me. (Thank God Beethoven’s 9th Symphony doesn’t put 1,300 calories of pure junk food into my body every time I listen to it.)
I used to draw a distinction between “art” and “entertainment”, using an exclusive definition of art the way you are now. Over time, though, I accepted that the distinction is illusory, and that there is nothing wrong with consuming content that is designed purely to excite me aesthetically and to cater to my current preferences, rather than to alter them.
I suppose I'm trying to remove the distinction from art and entertainment from the other direction--by saying that all entertainment is art, rather than that all art is entertainment. Would you eat the cheesecake if you knew that afterwards you'd forget eating it? I think even for the very most carnal pleasures (besides drugs) most of the enjoyment we get from them is still from the meaning we derive from them.
That said, at this point "art" doesn't really seem to be what I'm talking about, so I agree with your point to an extent. I don't know if I could truly define what art is, but I can say that it's not just to make us feel something and then that's the end of it.
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