Light travels through a vacuum; this is good news for art. We could watch a silent movie on the moon, or see a gallery opening on an asteroid, or read a book of poetry on a spacewalk.
Assuming we don’t convert sound to electromagnetic transmission, to enjoy a concert we will still need air or some similar gang of molecules, bouncing the waves from the orchestra or loudspeakers into our ears.
These materialist signal-transmission mechanisms omit the key element though. The physics of art can happen, theoretically, without the soul, but the medium is not the defining aspect.
If we can’t hear the poem spoken or see the written words, we can still touch a Braille encoding of the poem with our fingertips, and partake in it. What defines art is not the object or the signal – it is the impulse of consciousness in the exchange, both in the creation and in the partaking.
If we were telepathic there would be no need for art. All of our soul’s yearnings, imaginings, and playful constructs could be instantly transmitted to other souls. I imagine our earliest ancestors, their private joys and terrors, dreams and memories, all held in the solitude of the private mind. Did they feel all this before there was even language, or tool-making? The urge to represent one’s thoughts and feelings externally, one’s bliss and one’s foreboding, one’s mischief and one’s sorrow, to have another share at least some part of them, is a profound force that emerged through us into the world. From this urge we made and shared images, songs, gods, designs, games.
Art is a bridge, a construct made intentionally to enable an exchange between psyche and psyche. This remains true even if the creator and partaker of the art are the same soul, at different times. It remains true even if the bridge is not perfectly constructed, if it represents the amorphous or the aleatory; it is still a shared game. And it remains true regardless of the physics of the art’s construction or transmission. Far from being ‘artificial’, this urge to both create and partake in art is naturally emergent in the conscious soul; it’s an evident force of nature as surely as any other. But it is perhaps the defining force of conscious nature.
The corollaries of this postulate, and their implications for A.I., for material object fetishization, for dehumanizing consumerist commodification, for anti-creative authoritarianism, et. al., are left as an artistic exercise to the ensouled creator/partaker.