But art – I’ll offer a criterion – does not recruit people to believe or act or feel in a particular way. Søren Kierkegaard put it like this:
The indirect mode of communication makes communication an art in quite a different sense than when it is conceived in the usual manner … To stop a man on the street and stand still while talking to him, is not so difficult as to say something to a passer-by in passing, without standing still and without delaying the other, without attempting to persuade him to go the same way, but giving him instead an impulse to go precisely his own way.
Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction
Keith Oatley
Bibliography citation:
Kierkegaard, S. (1846). Concluding unscientific postscript (D.F. Swenson and W. Lowrie, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (current edition 1968).