FINE ART

any of the nonutilitarian visual arts, or arts concerned primarily with the creation of beauty and generally taken to include painting, printmaking, sculpture, and architecture, with literature, music, and dance sometimes being added. In its strict sense, fine art is to be distinguished from such decorative arts and crafts as wall painting, pottery, weaving, metalworking, and furniture making, all of which have utility as an end (the architect being differentiated from the builder in this respect). Popular and primitive art, and indeed art up to the end of the Middle Ages in Europe, served without embarrassment some purpose beyond the pure enjoyment of beauty. The distinction between artist and craftsman hardly appears before the Renaissance, and the term fine arts, or beaux-arts in France, does not appear until the mid-18th century. By then the founding of academies had given impetus to the concept of fine art as creation on a loftier level untrammeled by secondary considerations, but the most stringent distinction between fine and applied art belongs to the 19th century.