Human beings like to compartmentalise, organise, classify, stereotype things. But the thing about things is that they often refuse to be classified. That's why art is life and life is art, but not really.
Art is how you get people to see through new windows, new viewpoints, and live different lives, or just live their own lives better. Art is how you enrich people. A well-written account of an abused child (touch wood, you weren't/aren't one), allows you to experience what it is like, see things in a different light. It allows you to experience things you may not be able to experience in your life. You ponder, and get a bigger, broader perspective.
Art is about self-expression, self-discovery for the artist.
But really, art cannot exist in an artist until the artist has a life outside (used rather loosely - no artist can really be outside art) art. From this life, the artist draws upon the basics for art. It gives him the experience and foundation for his art. However, the artist's life in his art will teach him much also. But without this outside life, there is really nothing for the artist to draw parallels to. The two lives feed off each other, the are one and separate at the same time. They cannot be classified.
So yep, life is art, and art is life, for lack of a better word than is.
Perhaps the most important thing you can learn from art is that you cannot classify things. You just have to let them be the tangled inter-connected, interwoven network of things that they are. But, (and here comes my favourite line) within that complexity, sometimes you can find a startling simplicity. And, maybe by classifiying things, you are just making things more confusing, and further and further away from simplicity.
Everyone is an artist.
