An artist’s job is to create new software for people’s perceptions. They juxtapose, abstract, distill their subjects to cajole the minds of participants.
Like messages in bottles, art works are nestled in buildings, magazines, websites and text. Like booby-trapped toys they can silently explode a person’s subjective experience. There might be no outward signs that the event has occurred other than a shrug, but the nerve connections are forged.
There’s a lot of focus on the way artists get to this point - the tools, the training, the techniques and the treasure - so that others can follow. But that’s just part of the artist’s job specification.
For some reason the species produces these subversive agents, then suppresses them in the community, for reasons that go beyond interest in the artists themselves.
As Aldous Huxley pointed out in a 1962 lecture, rats who could press a bar to stimulate their pleasure centres with electrodes in their brain would do so 18,000 times a day. Those rats who could stimulate areas of their brains that mixed pain and pleasure in equal measure wouldn’t push the bar nearly as often, but they did always press it again.
I guess our species has a mix of fear and delight for art, and whatever the results, the artist has to supply the stimulus.