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Although the two-dimensional characteristic of the art structure reveals its specific nature considerably deeper than one-sided concepts that conceive it only as a form of knowledge or as a form of ideology only, this duality is still insufficient for a comprehensive analysis of artistic and creative activity. The very fact that aesthetics widely uses the notion of "artistic creativity" as a synonym for the term "art" shows that the analysis of its structure should reveal the uniqueness and significance of this creative beginning of artistic activity.

The creative origin of art is manifested in two ways: first, as a practical and spiritual creation, as a result of the creative activity of the imagination that builds life-form models of life; secondly, as a material practical creation, as a particular kind of labor that builds from stone, metal, sound, speech, and so on. In the first case the inner form of art is created, the figurative concretization of its content is realized, in the second is created the outer form, the material flesh of the artistic images itself.

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From this comes the place of the creative side of art in its structure. Its cognitive and value orientation characterizes, above all, the content of art, but its form only insofar as its visual structure derives from the peculiar features of the art. This is where the creative energy of art comes into play. It advances the process of knowledge and evaluation of the artistic content in the inner artistic form of art and brings this process to the level of the external form, the material incarnation. Here, on this "outer orbit" of the artistic system, the creative side of art immediately confronts its fourth structural component - the semiotic one, through which the material form acquires a character and a communicative function. Consequently, the creative energy of art no longer characterizes the artistic content itself, but the layout of that content, the passage of content into the shape and structure of the latter.

If the form of art is a direct product of the creative activity of artistic creativity, the difference between the inner and outer layers of form depends on what kind of activity - spiritual or material - gives birth to the artistic form and how the creative ability of art is associated with his other abilities - cognitive, evaluative and sign-communicative.

Structural analysis of artistic activity

Based on the understanding of human activity as the conscious and purposeful activity of the subject, directed at the object or other objects, the following types of activity exist:

1. transformational, which is expressed in the fact that the subject alters the objective reality in practice or in his imagination;
2. cognitive, which is expressed by the fact that the subject receives information about the objective properties, relationships and relations of the real world; its higher form is science;
3. value-oriented, which is expressed in the fact that the subject produces a certain system of values, ie. acquires information about the significance that objects have for it as a subject; this kind of activity is realized most consistently in the ideology that builds up and justifies systems of political, moral, religious, aesthetic values;
4. communication where the subject directs his activity to other people, but does not see in them any objects of transformation, knowledge or appreciation, but also entities such as himself, and seeks to establish with them the material and or) spiritual contact for the purpose of organizing one or other joint activity or exchanging some information; means of communication are the language and all other symbolic systems made for these purposes in the history of culture;
5. an artistic activity in which all four of the above-described activities are syncretically merged into one whole and indivisible from each other, giving it a qualitative distinction compared to the other four types of activity. It is this merger that allows the art to model the whole life experience of man.