Every work of art has goals. The goal could be "to accurately portray my garage, making sure to capture the church in the field behind it." Or the goal could be: "to show the church in the background to emphasize how much the material is overemphasized over the spiritual."
Science ain't gonna be able to tell you **** about a work of art that emphasizes something through symbols.
But does that officially mean that you are contractually closing your mind to anything art discloses that science can't confirm?
Let's look at it this way. Art is a form of abstract communication, like language and mathematics. The abstractions of language can be used to convey information about objective things in the real world, as well as non-physical abstract constructs like nationality and rules of chess, as well as abstract constructs of physical thing or worlds that do not exist or may be impossible to exist in the real world.
So, as with language or mathematics, if your intent is to convey objective information about the real world through an artistic medium, then great, but it can only be said to represent objective information about the real world if it is confirmed and vetted in some reliable way. We can't simply rely on our personal perceptions as we human beings are fallible creatures, yes?
Art, in my opinion, will be the abstract subjective expression of the artist who creates it. Can we subjectively communicate objective facts about the real world? Sure! Is what we claim to be objectively true true simply because we say it is so, in whatever form we say it? No.
However, the truthfulness of whatever the artist is trying to communicate is a different issue from whether someone finds the art aesthetically pleasing. The way the information is conveyed, be it about objective reality or complete fantasy, is both conveyed subjectively and received subjectively, and to my mind it does not matter if the manner in which the information is conveyed speaks to one person, 100 million, or no one. Aesthetically, it all comes down to subjective preference which, as I said earlier, is heavily influence by one's culture.
It is almost like saying one language is better than another, be it French over Zulu or Chinese over Tongan. If that is so, what is the criteria for deciding and why?
Of course, in any analytic communication system there are rules which are used to standardize and convey meaning in a consistent and decipherable way. So on those grounds I suppose that art could be objectively judged, but then we are not really talking about aesthetics in that case. Aesthetics to me speaks to what is pleasing (or not) or meaningful beyond the literal. Perhaps you disagree.