But is that "prevailing opinion" backed up by empirical evidence or merely a bunch of elaborate frameworks? The Great Chain of Being is quite the theoretical edifice, far more elegant and self-consistent than natural selection. The original models for DNA codon correspondence to amino acids was quite elegant, far more "rational" and "analytical" than the messy reality. What evidence is there that art is any different?

As for "context", that's simple. There are dogmatics who love to harp that paintings after a certain era do not constitute "art", while others claim they do. Is a given piece of music art or not? That probably depends upon the context of the individual critic's set of dogmas, nothing at all about anything objective, empirical, and independently verifiable.

So, then, we can have a bunch of dogmats nattering on and congratulating each other on the elaborateness and byzantine ornamentation of their arguments, but that doesn't make what they say an empirical, verifiable truth.