Graphic design is intentionally temporal. Graphic design deals with immediate issues, needs and desires. Today's political issue. These are the topics of graphic design. Art isn't like that.
Art attempts to be more than that.
There is a certain spiritual nature to any artistic effort that attempts to be transcendent, that attempts to realize ideas, feelings or experience that go beyond our immediate understanding. This assertion doesn't infer some kind of new age cosmic consciousness. I mean to infer that fundamental human feelings and experiences, if beautifully expressed, transcend the time and place of their creation. Graphic design involves much more mundane, periodic and materialistic affairs that move our lives along. In this sense, graphic design exists as a cultural artifact, while art exists more as a metaphysical gesture, a unifying and liberating experience that has a level of spiritual content that graphic design doesn't strive for.