Aad251

Categories of Visual Arts

(Contemporary ways of categorizing designed, created things as art)

[pic] Note: This is an expanded version of material first encountered in the course Introduction.

Setting aside, for the moment, the idea of what the arts might, could, or should be, the following categories are guidelines to help thinking (like the Image Styles / Isms). A single work could easily fit into more than one.

Three primary categories used today:

Fine Arts

Environmental Arts

Functional Arts

□ More on Fakes and Forgeries

❖ Fine Arts [pic] A few of the images in this section (and a few of the links) may be disturbing or offensive to some viewers, e.g. frozen blood in the form of a human head, views of the inside of the human body (human mummies).

• Artworld work

• The kinds of things exhibited in art galleries, museums; included in books and journals/magazines dedicated to art history, art criticism, and the visual arts (painting, sculpture plus much more); includes both permanent and temporary works, and Performances; works indoors and outside, sometimes in remote locations; material and immaterial (objects, processes, thoughts, actions—). [POE need not be on exhibit to be “fine art,” just be the kind of thing that could be.]

Examples (prehistory to contemporary, with emphasis on works that, for one reason or another, many people may tend to call “not art”):

□ You may visit Lascaux cave [Chauvet cave was linked in the Introduction] on the Web (originally this was probably Functional art, used in religion, magic, myth, ritual and the passing on of cultural knowledge). Many students may be familiar with the bison, horses, and other animals found in prehistoric cave paintings, but the most common image is the human hand print (a pigmented hand applied to wall, or bare hand placed on wall with pigment blown-on around...