Defining Powerful Art...

Questioner:  Does the most powerful art come from adversity or equally from pain and pleasure?

Define 'powerful' first maybe?  There are so many different discrete volume settings associated with an artist's dynamic range of inputs blended more or less skillfully in an artifact.  Notions like adversity combined with pleasure and pain doesn't help this innocuous probe into artistic value. Especially given how these ideas are more indicative of the tactile sense (though adversity implies a psychological conflict).

Isn't that real seat of where Art begins to manifest as a process in man which culminates in the final artifiact created?  The level to start this inquiry in where Art's primal beginnings originate creativity obviously must be where free will and imagination interact the most dynamically and free, somehwere more or less pragmatic or not. The essential neuropathway forms the foundation for the cognitive engine from which art may be properly considered to have as its source. There are of course old models regarding creativity which juxtapose it against states of blissful serenity beginning with the friction and heat generated by opposites sexually and through sublimating that adversity instead of transforming it with love into ecstacy, creativity has historically been seen to get its POWER or potency of effect.

But please know my response is based on more conjecture than it is on having any confidence that I in fact am spot on with respect to the questioner's true search? I mean with all due respect the right answer for this particular question ought to be about the hierarchy of details, each serving its own purpose and yet the entire gestalt arbitrarily conceived of within the artist's mind defines powers of originality. Powerful art is the successful reconciliation of dualism by the artist in his own cognition and with precision translated and expressed formally and materially in the world in which the typical adversity present in dichotomies is resolved in an integirty, call it what you wish by difference of perspective it matters not except that all verify the existence of beauty as the common denominator forming the essence of that integrity.

Thus the essence of  beauty has ore to do with a certain balanced structure to relationship which thus gives rise to the old  adage that it is in the eye of the beholder.