It's more than personality! It can be genes, sexual preference, religion, culture, predisposition in any direction almost. That's why Dick said to me that there were no rules in art. Another, might say it's in the eyes of the beholder. In my views. for I have more than one, it comes down to states of mind and predominant states of mind. There are no rules to states of mind. We might wish there were!
Art works in many directions simultaneously. We tend to think that we are recipients of art, but the reality is more often than not that we define the art around us and place ourselves where we feel we would be most comfortable with the art we have selected to be near! We fill our homes with art the reinforces our predominant states of mind.
Artists may play along with this and lose themselves forgetting their role as creators of new states of mind. In other words, art can complement existing states of mind or it can attempt to create new ones.
Those artists that swim against the stream may be poor in pocket as well as skills. Or, they may be great artists attempting to create new states of mind.
There are many examples of art work that is strange and leads us down pathways to new ways of thinking. I like to compare the art work of Scientific American magazine with that if the New Scientist. If you have read both, you will grasp what I mean about creativity versus conformity. I won't go into the details here.
In societies where there is considerable social integration such as India, the art contains many layers is social information that is absent in the art if say Canada or Sweden, both of which are highly social communities, but which are rich in providing for fairly specific groups of states of mind.
And, so it is with art. We can surround ourselves with images that mirror our surroundings in some way, or we can use art to build states of mind that we would otherwise have difficulty in sustaining.
