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Art has many purposes

Art is essentially the physical expression of ANY concept or idea- be it beauty, death etc. Some of the most powerful works of art would not be considered beautiful- for example the work of Francis Bacon- but are held in high regard because of the ability of the artist to convey a sense of something. While many works of art convey a sense of beauty, it is certainly not the only purpose of art as a whole.

CMV: Art without any purpose whatsoever isn't art, but worthless trash

I've heard some people say that art doesn't need to have any purpose, but I disagree with that. Artist can have many goals in their mind: 1. Making it pretty - there is nothing wrong with using art as a tool to make your surrounding look prettier 2. Making it thought provoking - art being used as means of conveying some ideas makes perfect sense 3. Recording historical events - stuff like paintings showing some important historical events can be very interesting I've probably omitted many more possible "goals", but you should get my point. Usually there is a purpose, no matter how trivial. Now lets come to my point - what about art that has no purpose? It simply exists, doing literally nothing. My favourite example is when someone left his [glasses](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/27/pair-of-glasses-left-on-us-gallery-floor-mistaken-for-art) on the floor in an art galerry, and visitors thought that it was an art piece as well. If someone was to try and make an interpretation of it, they could probably come up with many theories. Anyone could take a random picture or place a few objects randomly, and we could come up with a reasonable interpretation tricking ourselves into thinking that we were looking at actual art. That's why I believe that art needs to have some purpose, otherwise literally anything in our surroundings could be categorized as art EDIT: just to clarify things, my main point is that there is no art without any purpose

Art is more sophisticated than that.

If artists only cared about pleasuring people, they stand no chance against the nicotine and sex industries. Of course there is nothing wrong about making art simply to be pleasing to the eye, just as there is nothing wrong with making radio-friendly pop music. But art also has to power to expand your view of life and humanity, affect you in ways that make you a larger person (no not as in fat), more complete, more intellectual. This may sound like I am differentiating between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" but it is not that. Every piece of art affects every beholder in ways that they do not comprehend. You do not have to be able to verbally articulate how a piece of art affects you and what it is doing to affect you in that way, in order for it to have affected you. Leave that to art critics. If you enter a modern museum and come out feeling a little befuddled, you have still been affected. Your perspective of life has gained something. The majority of our brain processes are unconscious. So it is not possible to fully comprehend how something has affected you. There are too many variables. But beauty is only one aspect of art, and possibly a superficial one.

Art is faulty by definition.

Art is about creativity, which means deviations from perfection, or faults. If I run the same document through a printer that works perfectly 200 times, I will get 200 identical documents. If I run the same document through a slightly faulty printer, it could produce one of millions of interesting variations. That which is faulty is also chaotic, it grinds against what we instinctively know should be, it makes us want to fix it. Art inherently contains these qualities which are not beautiful.

Art needs beauty

A standard in art (as in everything else) is required and it exists