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Everything can be Construed as Art

Thank you, mostlogical, for accepting the debate. I would first like to contend that art is a product of life. I say life and not humans, because I do not wish to exclude other animals the capacity for creating or experiencing art. I would like to note that there is a distinction between creation and experience, and that art is not exclusive to the former or the latter. This distinction is important to note, as art in the case of the former is an artifact or craft that serves a purpose, be it aesthetic or practical, while in the case of the latter, art is not created by the agent experiencing it but still serves an artistic experience. An example would be a person deriving meaningful, aesthetic value from a painting or in nature itself. The question is then, what constitutes an artistic experience, and indeed, goes back to what art is in its essence. What is essential for art to be art? I contend that it must have creative capacity for the agent to derive meaning. Art is an expression, it is a concept that lives within the mind. Science and mathematics are both arts in their own rights, but they have no objective existence outside the human conception and interpretation of the world. We cannot find numbers in physical form, numbers are just concepts and interpretations of what exists. I contend that art follows the same form. Without human beings, or living creatures with the capacity for art, art ceases to exist. The Mona Lisa cease to be a beautiful painting and becomes a piece of paper with paint on it. Thus, those with the capacity to experience art is essential for the existence of the art itself. Herein lies my argument. I contend that art is subject to the mind's experience, not the hands that make it. To further illustrate this point, allow me to give a hypothetical example. Let us say that an artist crafts a statue, and people derive an artistic experience from it. Surely, we would qualify this statue as art? Let us then say that this same statue that people perceived was made by a man was in fact a product of nature. Would it at that moment cease to be art? Is then art maintained by the illusion that human beings crafted it? To bring up an old cliche, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so I contend it is with art. At the heart of things, artifacts are merely manipulations of already existing, natural elements. What makes these elements suddenly becoming art is not that human beings have touched it but that human beings have the capacity to experience it as art. If there was a block of marble untouched by man, does it become art the moment man marks it with a chisel? Does the mere dent suddenly become art? Art has no limits, and that is because the creative activity of making meaning or finding it is limitless as our imagination. Thus, anything/everything can be construed as art. Art is applied by the creative mind, and not the hands that sometimes does its bidding. I look forward to my opponent's arguments.