Concept
Visual arts
Overview
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts, also involve aspects of the visual arts, as well as arts of other types. Within the visual arts, the applied arts, such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design, and decorative art are also included.
Current usage of the term "visual arts" includes fine art as well as applied or decorative arts and crafts, but this was not always the case. Before the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the term 'artist' had for some centuries often been restricted to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the decorative arts, crafts, or applied visual arts media. The distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who valued vernacular art forms as much as high forms. Art schools made a distinction between the fine arts and the crafts, maintaining that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of the arts.
The increasing tendency to privilege painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, above other arts has been a feature of Western art as well as East Asian art. In both regions, painting has been seen as relying on the imagination of the artist to the highest degree and being the furthest removed from manual labour – in Chinese painting, valued styles were "scholar-painting", at least in theory practiced by gentleman amateurs. The Western hierarchy of genres reflected similar attitudes.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Whatever effect it produces is the immediate effect of that melody and harmony, and not of something else which is signified and suggested by them: they in fact signify and suggest nothing. It may be proper to say that the complete art of painting, the complete merit of a picture, is composed of three distinct arts or merits; that of drawing, that of colouring, and that of expression.
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what Visual arts is.
In all these respects art is, and remains for us, on the side of its highest destiny, a thing of the past. Herein it has further lost for us its genuine truth and life, and rather is transferred into our _ideas_ than asserts its former necessity, or assumes its former place, in reality.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay
Close in meaning to Visual arts; the term itself is not named.
Art and nothing else! Art is the great means of making life possible, the great seducer to life, the great stimulus of life. Art is the only superior counter-agent to all will to the denial of life; it is _par excellence_ the anti-Christian, the anti-Buddhistic, the anti-Nihilistic force.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Close in meaning to Visual arts; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Visual arts
Related ideas
- Fresco
- Artist
- Edo period
- Byzantine Empire
- Conceptual art
- Leonardo da Vinci
- Painting
- CD-ROM
- Michelangelo
- Realism (arts)
- Architecture
- Aesthetics
- Performance
- Performing arts
- Photon
- Photography
- Craft
- Sculpture
- The arts
- Raphael
- Camera
- Song dynasty
- Art
- Algorithm
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.