The Western canon is the body of books and, more broadly, music and art that Western scholars generally accept as the most important and influential in shaping Western culture. As such, it includes work perceived as the greatest works of artistic merit. Such a is important to the theory of educational perennialism and the development of high culture. The idea of a Canon has been used to address the question What is Art?; according to this approach, a work is art by comparison to the works in the canon—or conversely, any aesthetic law, to be valid, should not rule out any work included in the canon.