Does art express emotions?

Back to my exploration into So, why is this art? I will examine the fifth of the key points:
Does art express emotions?
The Contemporary explores this question thusly:

An artwork can tell stories or depict ideas; it can be realistic or abstract. However, for some people, the most important issue in art is that it expresses or stirs emotions. Art can be a record of what the artist is feeling and, at the same time, it can bring about emotional reactions in the viewer... Artists make choices about color, line, texture, and composition to evoke or express feelings. Sometimes this leads to abstracting a subject to make it more expressive...

Art can be an amazing tool for both communication and for catharsis. It can be an excellent healing mechanism as a means of letting go of or expressing our grievances. As a result, many artworks have a strong emotional impact whether or not that was their primary objective. Some artists even focus strictly on their abilities to convey moods and emotions and to connect with viewers on that level.

There are several artists working on both ends of this spectrum, including those who seek to create emotional works that convey pure moods and feelings and those who seek to create works that are wholly devoid of emotion and are driven purely to convey other ideas. It can be extremely difficult to detach, and many art movements have striven to do just that.

From my own experience, I think that the difficulty lies not in creating emotionally-charged artworks but in detaching to the extent of creating art that does not have an impact on or is not influenced by our emotional states. I find that if I am not fully aware of my own state of mind while creating art, my work is highly likely to be influenced by whatever mood I am in at the time.

It is possible to use art as a means of focusing one's energy to actively change one's emotional state. I find that if I can focus long enough on creating art while in a bad mood, especially without judging too harshly that which I am creating, the act of creating art can lead me into a different state of mind and can have a calming effect. It is generally easier to create an artwork that syncs up with my vision when I am already wholly in the emotional mindset that I want to convey, though.