system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Art as a philosophical concept doesn’t make sense to me and I’m an art student. Help.

Maybe I’ll provide you with a little background. I’m 18yo, whose family gave unintentionally some barriers to explore world freely and to develop my own opinions. I was taught by a antivaxx, flat earth, science denying aunt, that art is harmony and art must be beautiful. I weren’t allowed to express myself freely through painting - If I drew something uncomfortable  during bad days and mental health problems, I was mocked and humiliated. For this reason I found only academic, renaissance or ancient creations as art. All new, modern or postmodern stuff looked very pretentious and made without any skills, just unnecessary shock value.

It’s still hard for me to understand the “beauty” of Natalia’s LL works or performances made by Marina Abramovic. They aren’t harmonical, they aren’t beautiful by the standards I was taught to believe art should be like. One of my teacher said that art isn’t about beauty at all, but about emotions. And this is all so ironic, because what I want to study in the future is intermedia art. Can someone explain to me what is art and who is an artist? This word feels so overused that I want to throw up and I feel so lost...
gpt
Another point to make, besides the ones that you'll see about modern art not being about beauty, is that pre-modern art also isn't about beauty. You'll find that most pieces had a meaning to convey, for instance The Coronation of Napoleon, The Death of Marat or Liberty Leading the People were painted in a very specific context that makes it clear to see why they were painted. On top of that, they were classically beautiful. Medieval art, on the other hand, had an entirely different reason to be altogether, it needed to tell a (religious) story, and not capture a single moment, there was no use for things like proportions and perspective like renaissance art and therefore it seems weird and ugly for now, like a stepping stone for renaissance art. However both of them are still considered art.

Meaning is a central pillar in art, and modernity came to enhance it and destroy it.

I suggest seeing Ways of Seeing, by John Berger, you can find the episodes on youtube. The first one is about Walter Benjamin and his concept aura and if you study art you'll probably know already, since it's a pretty widespread studied, so it may get a bit boring, the other ones are fascinating even to the already initiated in art study.