Can magic be art?

I have read a few things about the art of magic, far less about the art of mentalism. What people say about this art is not always flattering. Some say that magicians are the ones that talk about art while dancers or painters do art. Others have said that magic is what people with no talent do if they want to stand on stage.
Unfortunately I have to agree.
I think one of the problems with magic is that we as magicians and mentalists spend a lot of time thinking about what the audience never perceive. We are thinking less on what we want to communicate to the audience. Magic is very different from singing, acting and painting, but art is not different from art. Art has to communicate something.
But there are other kinds of entertainment than art forms like music, acting, or dancing. People can be entertained by a juggler or acrobat, and those kind of acts can contain drama; drama in the form of a performer struggling to succeed. Those are acts that display skill and entertain in that way, they can also contain art but they don't have to.
I think that a lot of magic fall into the trap of being a display of skill and not art. There are very skilled performers that can display this skill so that the audience is left with no other explanation than that it was done by magic. But there are also a lot of performers who will perform tricks that the audience will not be able to explain, though they will know that it is not magic. I believe that these “tricks” are mostly performed as a display of skill and even some of the “magic” is a display of skill rather than art.
So what defines a great artist? I don't have the answer but I believe that at least one part of the answer is that a great artist do art because there is something that has to be said. A great artist do not do art to be seen. There is nothing wrong in itself in wanting to be seen and be on stage, but that will not produce art and definitely not great art.
If your motivation is to be seen, magic might be one of the better options. To become an acrobat or juggler requires a lot of practice if you want to be tolerable, while magic only requires a lot of practice in case you want to be really good. Magic is in its nature a secret art, while everyone can see how juggler does what he does, and if he is successful or not, people are not able to judge magic as easily.
So I have to give the critics right in that magic is perfect for people who have no talent but want to be on stage. To be a good juggler, singer or actor you have either to practice more and/or be better at communicating your emotions to an audience. As a magician you can much easier fake skill, that is after all what it is all about.
But is it true that magicians talk about art rather than do art? I think this is true as well. The ability to brake the laws of nature is from a dramatic perspective immensely strong, it will produce a feeling of astonishment more than any other art form is capable of. But why? I don't think many magicians are trying to say something about the world or try to open up their hart to the audience. This is what art is about, to communicate something. I think that we need to communicate something more than the moment of astonishment if we want magic to be an art.
Many magicians feel that what we do deserves to be an art, but very few seem to think about what they want to say. We want people to experience the moment of astonishment and resign to the obvious fact that magic is an art just because we magicians believe this moment to be something inherently beautiful.
So we talk about how what we do is an art, and we talk among ourselves about how we create this moment of astonishment. Because we want to create astonishment we often talk about the things that the audience will never see, that which we use to create this feeling of wonder. We choreograph movements in detail to create an illusion but spend little time trying to create an emotion. We create scripts that will hide manipulation but not always convey a massage.
It does not have to be this way but the fact is that although magic is an easy way to get on stage it is a very hard way to create art. A singer will have to practice a lot to be good but will have little problem to create art.
So what they say about magic is probably true, it is true because magic is easy if you want to get on stage, and magic is very hard if you want to create art.