Not irritating because of how often it's asked, but because of how impossible it is to answer. We can always turn to dictionaries at times like this, but even with them it's a muddy territory. We can say that some things are definitely art, like the Mona Lisa (which is practically the pop-cultural face of the art-concept), but there is a point where people start disagreeing.
For instance, take Duchamp's LHOOQ.
It is (as you can see) a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goatee on it, and the letters "LHOOQ" written at the bottom. If spoken aloud in French, those letters phonetically say "Elle a chaud au cul", or "There is fire down below", Duchamp's explanation for why she's smiling. Is this art? What about a Jackson Pollock painting? Or what about Tony Smith's "Die", a large, featureless steel cube? Where do we draw the line here? Can we draw any lines at all? Is everything art?
This isn't a question I have any awe-inspiring answers to, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Open questions are things that games thrive on, just like a puzzle with a devious hidden solution is best-suited for a novel or a television show where someone can choose to reveal it slowly. That said, what's the best way to translate this confusion into an interactive challenge?
In this case, showing the nature of art is tied by nature into showing its history. Showing an art movement that hasn't happened yet would be the same as inventing that art movement, and since people don't do that all the time it's fair to presume that there isn't an infinite supply of them waiting to be plucked from the conceptual aether. This means that this piece of aesthetics is best expressed by making an interactive method of teaching art history.
Now, some games have already tried this sort of thing- it wouldn't be very difficult to buy a ROM-hacking program and turn Mario's Time Machine into a game about da Vinci and Caravaggio. But making it fun means tying these things into the mechanics, so instead we could shoot for a platformer that pulls out all of the stops in the cheesiness department, something akin to Megaman where the main character fights a series of bosses in an order of their choosing and gains a different ability by beating each. The player would be a young artist, searching for their style, and they'd be tromping through the works of the Great Artists who came before them. For example, they would fight Picasso in the middle of the chaos of his Guernica painting, and when he was defeated they'd be able to unleash a smaller version of that overlapping chaos.
By the end, the main character would have all sorts of powers tied directly to these artists, and a loose history of the medium, at which point they would defeat the final boss (the terror of not living up to the Greats) and gain a style all their own, which could be turned into a new power for use in a New Game Plus if the designers so desire.
This isn't perfectly satisfactory, but that's sadly an aspect of the question. Creating a definite answer may be possible, but it would take years of argument to even put it on the playing field. The best a designer can realistically do is give the players the context to understand the question and come to their own conclusions.
Sources:
"Die". National Gallery of Art. 5 Oct 2014.
"Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso" 2009. PabloPicasso.org. 5 Oct 2014.
"L.H.O.O.Q or Mona Lisa" 2014. The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. 5 Oct 2014.
Slater, Barry Hartley. "Aesthetics". University of Western Australia. 5 Oct 2014.
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