When I was in college majoring in Art, there was a general consensus within educated art circles, that fine art was grounded in a central, overarching meaning. This meaning was mathematical (as in music), archetypal, and informed by human boundary experiences—those explored in myth—and this central meaning  was understood to be unchanging at its core. While theoretical emphasis shifted—from the canon of Polykleitos to root ratios or the human narrative of shared experience—art was always seen as reflecting some aspect of these enduring “truths.”