What is Art

I've been spurred onto furthering my exploration of the field of art following my previous piece, which I am told did much in the way of lightening the load of the common man in his struggles in the earthly domain.

What is art? A much debated question in various circles. Circles? Moving on. Another way to phrase the question is what isn't art, which once classified leaves us with the categorical remainder being the relevant substance. Listing all that isn't art is however not an activity for which I am willing to spare the voluminous time demanded of such a venture, so I'll return to the original form of enquiry in the form of the question, what is art.
A certain online dictionary reveals the following words designed to educate:

the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

This you will agree is nonsense, for to judge of what is more than ordinary significance requires knowledge of what is ordinary significance. Do events and objects helpfully declare themselves to be above, below or equivalent to this standard of import? No, they don't. Upon picking up a ringing telephone is one greeted by a declaration by the caller that this is a call of ordinary or below oridinary significance? I leave it to the reader to decide. Or alternatively does a picture on the wall announce its ontological being to be above this state of ordinariness and hence art, while contrarily a photograph in that most reviled of substances, a newspaper, announces its innate significant ordinariness, or even sub-ordinariness? Again, no.
Though I have even been too slack in my criticism. What of these aesthetic principles to which the relevant objects must conform, tell me more- what are they? But our author says no more and seems to imagine that it is sufficient to have lobbed this grenade of grievous obfuscation into the no-man's land of the reader's ignorance, and that by some mysterious alchemical process of self-determination wonderful illuminatory psychological events will transpire and enlighten all.
But all that will transpire is our poor citizen will feel himself cast adrift in this nebulous sea of aesthetic principles, and be more confused and helpless than when he began. He had needed the intellectual clarification to one slippery enquiry; now he needs a second and more treacherously esoteric issue clarified before he can return to the first.
Art must conform to aesthetic principles...are these principles written down somewhere? If so where, and if not why not. And if not are we fools to trust in their existence? But even if the nature of these famous- some would say infamous- aesthetic principles can be made clear, a point strikes me: Art must conform to aesthetic priciples. What must aesthetic principles conform to? They must conform to what it is that makes art art. So art must conform to what makes art art so as to be art. Whilst of course being of above ordinary significance.