Thanks for the clarification on “applicability”. Also, good point with regards to the three-tiered structure of literature... but your insight only reinforces my instinct that you can’t lump all creative mediums together and come up with any meaningful universal qualities about what makes art Art.
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But then you're basicly saying: there are two (or more) fundamentally different things that just so happen both to be called art. This raises other interesting problems; one can no longer talk about 'the artist' and intend for it to apply to both music and literature; one can no longer talk about 'artistic freedom' and intend for it to apply to both. If you want to say that, I can't argue with it, but it raises a whole host of new issues.
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I think I disagree here. In my opinion, “the arts” can be used as a catch-all phrase to mean all the different mediums that share the same fundamental feature of being a means for expressing creativity; “art” can be generalized to mean any creative work at all (the Kindergarten class’s art) or a work of surpassing achievement in any given medium. However, I think the things which distinguish Art from mere entertainment or outright drivel in any particular medium
are fundamentally different. Any generalization that is universally applicable is necessarily so vague as to be essentially meaningless – for instance, to say that all Art (i.e., the highest achievements in any given medium) is “aesthetically pleasing” doesn’t tell us much. By whose aesthetic standard? What does the word “aesthetic” encompass? Does “aesthetic” even have any meaning outside of reference to a particular medium? “The artist” really only does apply to a practitioner if he’s talented in a particular medium. Naturally, you could say that anyone who picks up a paintbrush or sets pen to paper is an “artist”, or at least is engaging in an artistic activity; but I think we mean “artist” here as “one who is particularly skilled in the practice of a particular art”. When I call Tolkien an artist, I mean he’s a literary artist. As far as I know, he knew doodley-squat about, say, composing music. His paintings have a certain charm, but, unlike his prose, I wouldn’t consider them to be high art.