Art as a Relief Fromm Isolation

I have recently been reading a book by Erich Fromm entitled The Art of Loving. In this book, he has stated that individual humans are isolated beings who are disconnected from nature as well as each other. According to Fromm, this disconnection creates within us a feeling of anxiety. He further proposes that much of human action and interaction is an effort to relieve this anxiety by providing a connection with something outside of our self. It is one of these methods which may provide us with a definition of art.
According to Erich Fromm, one way in which human beings relieve their anxiety of isolation is through creative activity, such as art. The attempt of the artist is to connect themselves with their art in order to connect themselves with something of the outside world. Assuming Fromm is correct in these thoughts, perhaps art is what is created when an individual attempts to relieve their isolation.
This definition may help to solve some of the problems met when attempting to define art. An artist would not have to intend his or her art as art, but only be striving to relieve their anxiety. This would help explain the cultural problem with the intention definition—because the artist does not necessarily need to intend his works as art, the works of a culture without a concept of art can still be considered art. This definition would also provide a special characteristic with which to define art, it would not require the recognition of critics in the artworld to consider it as art, and it would give a definition of art which can encompass works of art throughout all points in time. The main problem which I see in this definition rests on its complete dependency on Erich Fromm’s philosophy which, like many philosophies, has many problems of it's own.


QUESTION: Wartenberg says, “on the one hand, the arts are often seen as challenging prevailing social norms: the artist is a rebel who stands apart from society to condemn it. From this point of view, art celebrates the potential of the human species and castigates society for suppressing that potential” (Wartenberg 11). Would it be too vague to define art as nothing more than an expression of human creativity?