Mexican wrestling, Lucha Libre (“free wrestling,” literally - also the term used in Mexico for the Olympic style we call freestyle and the French call “lutte libre,” same words) is more about human frailties and character interaction, with a heavy smattering of gymnastics thrown in. For example, Art Barr (God rest his soul) was an American who worked in Mexico under a mask, using the name “American Love Machine.” The Love Machine at his best was a cocky heel (bad guy) who would, for example, do jumping jacks over a downed opponent, taunt the crowd by “swimming” to the ring (the way Mexicans stereotypically swim to America), and so forth. He was a hot-tempered guy who would often be disqualified for breaking simple rules like using (illegal) piledrivers out of anger. Other wrestlers had deeper and more interesting character motivations, but one of the big ones was always flat-out “honor.”
The mask, worn by MANY wrestlers (most notably including El Santo, who was a Mexican pop culture icon, and Mil Mascaras), was sort of a representation of honor and manhood. In American wrestling, a wrestler is emasculated when he loses a match and as a stipulation has to shave his head. In Mexico, losing the mask was a plot device to show shame, and feuds culminated in a mask-versus-mask match. (If a demasked wrestler had another feud, it might culminate in a hair-versus-mask match.) There was quite an uproar when, after he lost his mask in WCW, the WWF/WWE brought in the Mexican superstar Rey Misterio Jr. with a mask. It’s supposed to be an irreversible shame. El Hijo Del Santo, son of El Santo, maintained his father’s honor by wearing an identical silver mask.
As to the “art” question, wrestling can be broken down at its most basic to a continuum of psychology versus drama. In Japan, matches are worked so as to tell a coherent story within the match and over a career - one notable Japanese wrestler, Toshiaki Kawada, worked a long feud with an old schoolmate, Mitsuharu Misawa, in which (and I’m grossly oversimplifying here) one of the threads was Misawa continually attacking his knee. They so hated each other that Misawa was just out to destroy him by any means necessary. That feud culminated in 1994, and to this day Kawada will still occasionally fall down in a match after a very light knee attack, “selling” the knee. American wrestling is a different animal altogether - while they tell stories, their motivation in a match is to pop the crowd as many times as possible by using their marquee moves.
Mexican wrestling is about telling a story, but it focuses on the character motivations as opposed to the Japanese focus on working a coherent match. They do spectacular moves for the sake of doing spectacular moves, and they work with the characters’ motivations to draw the crowd in in the soap opera style, whereas American storylines have been focused out of the ring more and more as the style developed into the TV-friendly four-minute matches crammed with marquee moves. Also, the lost focus on stiffness (making it “look real”) makes Mexican wrestling look almost kabuki-ish, whereas Japanese wrestling tends to be very stiff (in one Kawada-Misawa match, one of them hauled off and whacked the other so hard that he fractured an orbital bone; in a match between two extremely stiff Americans that took place in Japan, Stan Hansen clotheslined Vader with such force that Vader’s eye briefly dislodged, though I haven’t seen a tape of it. It’s a minor legend.).
And, of course, I have to point out that I’m talking about Japanese wrestling at its best. At its worst, it’s a festival of random head-dropping to pop the crowd and no-selling (ignoring attacks) for the sake of exciting the audience.
Hope I’m not ranting too much. 
