A nice instance of attribution of causality to art is found in Virgil, who comments on the effects of poetic creation thus:
immemor herbarum quos est mirata iuvenca
certantis, quorom stupefactae carmine lynces,
et mutata suos requierunt flumina cursus
Virgil attributes to poetry not only effect on other creatures (cows and lynxes which are enchanted by poetry), thereby proclaiming universality of art, but also causal effects (streams that stop flowing because of poetic force). Of course Virgil, being a son of the enlightened ages, no longer explicitly believed in the immediate causal effects of art, but this mythical origin is still reverberating in his lines. If we read them hyperbolically, we do not come to a satisfactory explanation, after all effecting nature is not a higher degree of aesthetic effect, it is rather qualitatively distinct from effects on a public of reasonable beings.
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