3D Art Fantasy Surrealism Pictures: modern pop art surrealism. Contemporary Canadian neo surrealism artist George Grie art prints.

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The visual arts are a class of artforms, including painting, sculpture, photography, and others, that focus on the creation of artworks which are primarily visual in nature. The visual arts are distiguished from the performing arts, language arts, culinary arts, and other such classes of artwork. The definition is not strict, and many artistic disciplines involve aspects of the visual arts as well other types.

In Britain until recently the fine arts—painting, sculpture, printmaking, et cetera—were seen as distinct from craft disciplines such as applied art, design, textiles, and the various metalworking disciplines such as blacksmithing and jewelery. This distinction arose from the work of a group of artists led by William Morris known as the Arts and Crafts Movement whose political aim was to value vernacular artforms as much as high forms. The movement was at odds with modernists who sought to withhold the high arts from the masses by keeping them esoteric.

The result of the conflict between the two groups was to politicise the products of what we now know as visual artists. British art schools made a clear distinction between the fine arts (a term that hints at their supposed superiority) and the crafts in such a way that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of high art. Although this is no longer the case, the residue of inequality between the crafts or applied arts and the so-called fine arts still exists in some quarters. In Britain the term "visual arts" is suitably independent of these older, loaded concepts and as such is the preferred term for work across all the disciplines in question.

A similar stigma exists in the US, where "arts and crafts" has a very particular meaning, denoting the sort of artwork first taught in elementary school and also (later in life) a variety of kitsch, household artwork. Most craftspeople are still not seen as practicing "fine art" among the traditional art school set, but certainly can produce "high art" if considered to be a "visual artist", nomatter the medium.

The term "fine art" was coined in 1767 in reference to the arts that were "concerned with beauty or which appealed to taste" (S.O.E.D 1991). The term has been used to refer to a limited number of visual art forms, including painting, sculpture, and printmaking, and is still used by schools, institutes, and other organizations to indicate a traditional perspective on the visual arts, often implying an association with classic or academic art.
The word "fine" does not so much denote the quality of the artwork in question, but rather the purity of the discipline. This definition tends to exclude visual art forms that could be considered craftwork or applied art, such as textiles. The more recent term "visual art" is widely considered to be a more inclusive and descriptive phrase for today's variety of current art practices, and for the multitude of mediums in which high art is now more widely recognized to occur.
The term is still often used outside of the arts to denote when someone has perfected an activity to a very high level of skill. For example, one might say that "Pelé took football to the level of a fine art."

That fine art is seen as being distinct from the crafts is largely the result of an issue raised in Britain by the conflict between the followers of the Arts and Crafts Movement, including William Morris, and the early modernists, including Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. The former sought to bring socialist principles to bear on the arts by including the more commonplace crafts of the masses within the realm of the arts, while the modernists sought to keep artistic endeavour exclusive, esoteric, and elitist.
Today the term is often improperly used to give any artistic discipline an emphasis that implies higher quality.