I think it's hard enough to define my own Art or Theory of Art let alone a universal definition of what art is... or isn't.
In fairness to Lovecraft, it is not clear that in the quote he insists that it is an all-inclusive definition, or even any definition at all, and even the heading calls it the definition of
good art, not art in general.
I would agree that
defining art or good art is almost impossible, though what Lovecraft says there makes much sense - when I think of all manner of good works of art, including even good photographs, they will often contain something of what he says here: they make you look with new eyes. The artist saw something that we normally would not notice.
Reminds me of an anecdote about a local artist that I once read. One Pieter van der Westhuizen's wife had died, and he spent months in depression. People would see him just sitting on his porch all day long, doing nothing. So eventually some of his friends took him to the beach to get his mind off things. And they knew he was feeling better when he said "Wow, now
that's really beautiful!" And then they noticed: he wasn't looking at the ocean, but at a piece rusting barbed-wire fence they had all passed without noticing it.
I know exactly what he meant.
It's always fun to poke holes in attempted definitions of art by coming up with an example of something that someone has presented as art, but that doesn't fit into the definition. And thus the definition gets ever broader, until it gets so broad as to be vague and thus kind of pointless.
I once came up with this definition: visual art is the visual representation of real or imaginary objects or ideas. It would probably include most things that have been called art, but, er, it doesn't really tell us much, so what's the point then? Now if you use the ARC's type of definition you get something far more specific, and also something that excludes almost all of art history from being art, or at least good art.