So I've done film school and I've done design school. I absolutely believe that the artistic / creative process and "art" itself can be taught...to a point. My father is an engineer and he will never, ever understand, value, or be able to create art. That's fine. As long as you have some creative in your blood (this is a topic for another day) art can be taught.

Art is simply telling and story and/or expressing ones ideas, thoughts, views, and emotions. Music, film, painting, digital design, etc all do this. You take something that is internal and you externalize it and try to transfer it to the audience so that they can internalize some of it. Art is nothing without the audience just like art is nothing without the idea.

There are certain rules that apply to different forms of art that allow the artist to be successful in this. This is why art school works. It teaches you a lot of things.

We did heaps of ideation work in my writing for film, design, and production classes. Ideas are bullshit most of the time. The hardest thing is to come up with an idea worth sharing and then taking that idea to a new level. I'm sure you have all encountered that friend with a million "brilliant" ideas. The ideas are shit, but he's excited about his idea because he knows things that you don't know. He is just having issues communicating the idea to you. (Or else they are just shit. There are a lot of plain-and-simple shit ideas out of there. Unoriginal copies.)

It takes a lot of work and iteration and circling around the initial seed of an idea until it is fully formed. Part of school was figuring out a process that can move the idea from a little seedling to a fully fleshed out idea. We did exercises to look deep within ourselves and our emotions to find new ideas. We did bullshit tactics like writing down every idea that comes to mind and connecting the dots, etc. Ideation is hard. Things like collaboration, feedback, conversations, inspiration, brainstorming are tactics to help the idea become fully formed. They are also things that artists rarely do until they have been taught how to do them.

Once you have the idea, you have to figure out how to communicate it and make it accessible to the audience. With film, you have to have the technical side down in order for the audience to be able to ignore the technical side and get to the story and idea. In particular, the edits and sound in film should be invisible. If you notice the cuts in a film, the editor has done a poor job. This same idea is reiterated when I started practicing design. John D. Berry - "Only when the design fails does it draw attention to itself; when it succeeds, it’s invisible."

Art is so much more than the above. Art is a culmination of a million little bits coming together to create something that can be transferred to the audience. It can make the audience see what you see. It can create new emotions in the audience. It can take on a life of it's own and have and unintended effect on the audience - emotions or readings into or whatever. People take what you have created and make it their own. That's good art.

So, can you teach it? Sure. You can teach tactics on how to grow ideas into something real. You can teach them how to take the idea and make it something that is aesthetically and technically sound. You can teach certain "rules" that allow you to communicate to your audience better. You can give them opportunity to be successful and to fail and you can teach them how to recover and channel that failure into something new.

The rest is up to the artist. The artist must have the desire to create and share their creations and put the time and energy into the art. This is why I say my father will never create art. He has no desire to. You could teach him art for 50 years and at the end of the day, he would go home and tinker, not explore deep ideas in his head and working on conveying them through an artistic medium.