"Lady in the Lake" by Raymond Chandler (1943)

A work of art is a message, from a stranger, that makes one feel not alone. In order to achieve this effect of shared humanity, art must project a personality. Personalities do not aggregate well. A crowd is an example. The challenges of aggregation is the reason why novels are typically written single-handedly, whereas science and engineering are practised in groups.

Aggregation is more likely to be successful when dominated by a strong leader projecting his own vision of humanity. Film directors create this way. Steve Jobs produced this way. Whether a gadget is art depends on whether a user when granted exclusive access to this gadget feels less lonely---without feeling less conscious. (The exclusive access rules out the effect of belonging to a community of users.)

Nature is not an artist. Art is permeated by a concern for humanity. Nature is uninterested.

Art---like pure mathematics---is a product of irrational obsession with perfection. The irrationality is in the inputs' incommensurability with the artist's rewards and, perhaps, even with the benefit to his contemporaries. The insufficiency of rewards can stem from the artist's stubborn neglect of public demands or from superior vision. (In this sense, Jobs's creative process was artistic.)

A novel approaches perfection when the novelist lives through it, instead of suspending living in order to write. Such a novelist invests his work with as much creativity as he would apply to his living. One writes instead of living when one is constrained in circumstances or time, when one wants to see actions' consequences without the fog of responsibility, when one has no audience for one's living, or when one craves for a linear narrative.

Art is a message from a stranger. So solitary living is not art (even when the messages are sent to one's future selves). Public living can be.