Art can serve very many diverse purposes. Most of the time, it serves a purpose connected in some way with emotion. It can serve simply as a personal release of emotion for its creator. It can also convey its creator's emotion to its viewers. Most of the poems we have studied in class probably have fallen into one of these two categories. Sometimes, the artist creates the art for a specific purpose, whether to rally the public after a loss, or to convey some of the artist's experiences to those who do not share them (like the poem "110 Stories" that we read). Thus art can have a practical purpose as well as a purely artistic one. Some art, however, does not stem from the artist's emotion, but, rather, is intended to incite emotion on the part of its audience. For example although Beethoven's "Pathetique" Sonata often causes emotion in its listeners, I doubt that Beethoven was feeling those same emotions as he wrote it, if only because music of that quality usually requires too much planning to be composed on a whim. Then again, given who he was, it is actually quite possible, even probable, that he wrote it spontaneously. Anyway, whether this piece is an example or not, it is true that for some art, emotion is the goal, not the source.
There is also a second main purpose of art (emotion was the first): creativity. Not all art comes from or creates emotion. Some art is simply created for its own sake, or for the sake of novelty and wonder. Quite a lot of music fall under this category, as does some twentieth-century visual art, like the painting above: Yves Tanguy's The Ribbon of Excess. These works of art perpetually amaze their audiences, who marvel at the ingenuity and creativity of the artists. Therefore, actually, this art, too, inspires emotion among its viewers, this time emotions of worder and amazement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Ford
http://www.all-about-beethoven.com/patetica.html
http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/artists-a-z/T/6084/artistName/Yves%20Tanguy/recordId/24051
