Do you wish there's a god?

[Belacqua]

All right, I'm going to get really picky here, because this is my field. 

I agree that perception is an artform in itself, and that art has the potential to expand our perceptions of the world around us, just as literature can.

I don't think that a mental function is an art form. Art is intrinsically involved with its material, with its presentation, with sharing, etc. And mental images aren't that. It's true that we make mental images -- both Kant and Blake called our perceptive and interpretive faculties "imagination" -- imaging the world -- but calling that art would be a stretch. 

I also agree that art is largely about selection and emphasis, most often because of sensual or aesthetic priorities.  That makes it a variety of entertainment.

I guess so, depending on what we think entertainment is. If entertainment is mere relaxation or enjoyable time-wasting, no. 

Perhaps a better way of saying this is that the world doesn't come with a message at all, it's we who insert our messages into our art.  So we have to be cautious about what we are saying, because some people will mistake pictures of the world for the world itself, per Magritte.

Maybe... but we don't just look at the world and insert a message. As we gain consciousness of the world we fill it with meaning -- better, we gain consciousness of the world by filling it with meaning. If the psychologists are right, when a baby is born the world looks to it like chaos. The first meaning the baby finds in the world is that when the big warm thing who gives food goes away we don't like it. And we just go from there. 

So in our conscious state we never perceive the world apart from the meaning and messages we give it. The human world, the phenomenological world, is replete with meaning from the beginning of our consciousness. Only the view of science -- the supposedly non-human view -- posits a world without meaning. But none of us experiences that. It's an abstraction. 

As for Magritte, those jokes get old fast. 

Art is about directed attention.  

Just for reference here: I have a master's in painting from a New York art school, and a doctorate in the philosophy of art from a Japanese university. And I have never heard anyone say that art is about directed attention. 

People used to say that taking a photo is the act of directing attention. But maybe they don't say that any more, what with Photoshop and all. 

Certainly artists want to direct attention. But is that what the art is about? Or do they direct attention in order to do something else? To stick with the names I mentioned before, Brueghel and Rembrandt do more than point. If somebody directs my attention, they sure as hell had better have something good to direct me to. 

Artists use all sorts of different techniques to draw attention: color, contrast, drama, emotion, permanence, talent, and so on.  Any given artifact is saying, "This is worth paying more attention to than something else."  That is the artist's assertion.  Is it always true?

There's a lot more bad art in the world than good art.

Right. Well, some things are more worthwhile looking at than others. That's why it's better to look at the good ones. I would never dispute that there's bad art. But why is this relevant? Art enriches, and some of it enriches more than others. 

Now, going back to what you said earlier, about how the religious classics are lipstick on a pig: Do you remember the chapter in Walden called "Reading"? If you wanted to review that, I think you'd see that the author is decisively and entirely in disagreement with you. If he were posting on this forum, you would tell him that he's wasting his time.