Albert Murray, from The Omni-Americans:

Art is by definition a process of stylization; and what it stylizes is experience. What it objectifies, embodies, abstracts, expresses, and symbolizes is a sense of life. Accordingly, what is represented in the music, dance, painting, sculpture, literature, and architecture of a given group of people in a particular time, place, and circumstance is a conception of the essential nature and purpose of human existence itself. More specifically, an art style is the assimilation in terms of which a given community, folk, or communion of faith embodies its basic attitudes toward experience.

And this is not all. Of its very nature, an art style is also the essence of experience itself, in both the historical and sensory implications of the word.

… The human organism must be nourished and secured against destruction, to be sure, but what makes man human is style. Hence the crucial significance of art in the study of human behavior: All human effort beyond the lowest level of the struggle for animal subsistence is motivated by the need to live in style.

Look at a culture’s art to see what that culture is.