Art artificially manipulates the mind. The artist uses symbols, colors, shapes, timing, angles, sounds, word play and other techniques to play on the audience’s psychology, subconscious, emotions, audio and optical physiology and internal sensory processing systems. One significant point about this is that it shows that the mind can be artificially manipulated.

That humans can be effected by the fake of art, the artificial– sometimes even more so than reality– says something significant about the reliability of human aesthetic perception. Human emotions and psychology being a direct path to, or identifier of, larger objective truths is at best a dubious notion.