What is art?

One of my favorite things about teaching is asking the students for personal responses to weird questions, so before we finished talking about the arts, I played Albinoni's Adagio in G minor and asked them to answer the question "What is art?" I'm personally happy I never had to answer it, but among the many misuses of vocabulary words such as haunting, mournful, exuberant and repertoire, I found a few well thought out responses and interesting sentences of which I want to share some excerpts, spelled and punctuated as they did:

Class 1:
It doesn't need to be beautiful, but it touches your heart.
The music is like a river moving in my heart.
Art should be something that can share the same feelings and comfort our souls.
It seems a time machine creates art (Vango's paintings were a kind of bullshit when he was alive, now they are considered art).
Art is created with emotiong. It will tell you stories or feelings without words.

Class 2:
The monrody of sad music will touch my heart.
Vango's paintings play an important role in the exploration of mankind's soul and heart.
Without art, maybe we can eat but we cannot live.
They can soothe, inspire and unite us.
Art is the bridge between artists and audience.
Art is something that can brings us to another place.

Class 3:
Art can delight, alert or comfort us. Anything that can evoke such feelings can be termed art in my mind.
Art is something that can affect people in a spiritual way.
Art in an instrument to release people's emotions,
Art can give us a tool to soothe our pain.

I'm pretty impressed with their creativity. I don't think I could ever come up with some of those turns of phrase. Now, all I need to work on is ridding them of the tendency to say "maybe" all the time and to use "such as.... and so on" and "in a word.....[gazillion words]". Their writing, definitely a work in progress.