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Does it make sense to walk with your feet? Let's say “no”, and then what?
Art has been rationalized throughout its history — in a formal sense, from the moment the concept of the rational appeared, that is, from the pre-Socratics onwards. Informally-xs, but the drawings of the Chauvet cave look too systematic not to be rationalized. It's not what we do or don't do, because we have a choice, it's just how it happens. Even the fact that rationalization should not be reductive follows, again, from the very principles of rationality.
There are problems with reduction as such, of course, but they are not so much problems of rationalization as problems of sampling. This is partly why attempts to form a unified theory of aesthetics do not lead to anything final — in the past, this rolled by excluding the art of entire epochs and continents, and now we have to admit that there is simply too much of everything. Fuck putting it all under one system. Even the post-structuralists haven't figured it out in half a century, and the assurances of ur-cognitive scientists sound like a repetition of attempts to weigh the soul at the moment of death.
All of this is because art is a dynamic and undeconstructed concept. The very use of this word does not allow us to somehow rationalize the practice behind it. So when we talk about art, we can only talk about recorded history, or about art in the colloquial sense, in which vegetable stew can also be art.
This, in turn, does not make the theory something meaningless. The eighteenth century cannot be understood without Lessing, the nineteenth without Ruskin, and the twentieth without Greenberg. When Se-hae talks about painting as moving bones, it's as legitimate a way to break into the Eastern canon as going to museums.
In addition, the theory is read not in order to put an end to this question — the reader of the 21st century is probably no longer able to think so-but in order to join the great dialogue that began even before the beginning of settled life.
The theory has something to add to it.
I want to make a reservation, maybe I misunderstood the question.
In a sense, yes. Not that it is worth introducing any canons and requirements for specific works, no. Creativity must be original and free from shackles, otherwise it will be a craft. Nevertheless, it is still necessary to distinguish between creativity and near-creative hangers-on, who consider masterpieces to be a cacophony of everything at once, or who admire a set of colorful blots on the canvas. Art doesn't just have beauty and emotion – it has to carry an idea. A certain message that many contemporaries do not have.