Of course art is subjective; it has to be, or it can’t be art!
For me, art almost always has more to do with QUALITY, or refinement. Watching a professional geisha serve tea, you might know what I mean. At first, as a student in Japan, the idea of taking all day to prepare yourself and your surroundings just to pour a bowl of tea sounds nuts. Japanese tea service is art BECAUSE of all this care. Each movement, each action, is highly deliberate and very, very practiced. And it can engender a serious calming emotional response to partake in such a ceremony.
Maybe a simpler demonstration would be for you to Google Anne Geddes babies and see what comes up. You get all these stunning and whimsical examples of her work, and then some other stuff included that are attempts by amateurs to copy her style. Anne captures a feeling in her photos, an essence of innocence, which others can’t copy. Then there is all the careful attention to detail in color and form and light. You’ll see some photos, too, that make you go, “Oh! Poor kid.” And you know, you just get, that the person who made that photo just does NOT “get” it.
Or, look at the daily photos thread. We have some amazing photographers here on the Flob! Paogao, Belgian Pie, and Fox are three of my favorites. They each have a very distinctive style, but their photos show much more than just snaps I might take of the same subject. There is real artestery in they way they capture their subjects. Paogao’s photos have almost dizzying amounts of movement. That’s movement in a still medium. That just kills me! All three of these guys have different subjects, usually, and different styles, but they all produce ART, IMO, not just pictures.
In painting and sculpture or design, I think sometimes an artist is an artist entirely for his style alone. Sometimes an artist developes a style that is so easily recognizable (including the three photographers mentioned above), that his work is considered art. Take Picasso, for instance. The first time I saw some of his things, I though, “What rubbish!” But when you learn more about his works, and see more of them, you can see that he has a style of his own, he also does realistic work with the same recognizable style, and that what he does that isn’t realistic he is doing very deliberatly and better than anyone else can do it. It became easier for me to see him as a real artist when I saw more of his work, and learned more about what he was doing. Well, some of the “found” art I still don’t have a lot of reguard for. I put together a bike seat and handlebars myself and called it a bull when I was about nine years old. My mom said, “Well I’ll be damned. You must be a genius! Picasso did that, too, and that’s what they called him!” I don’t think my mom thought either of us were very smart!
Anyway, I hope that helps.
For the same reason i have (in my previous comment) avoided any specific term that would narrow down “art” to something like “products” or “things” and mentioned at one point people who buy “things or services”, because in the context of art in exchange for payment i define a concert performance as a service one can buy, not a thing.