Fine Arts
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Fine Arts. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a term generally applied to those arts in which the artist seeks chiefly to give pleasure by the immediate impression produced on the mind by his work. These arts are thus distinguished from arts which are designed to answer some practical purpose, and so have been termed useful. Antique, Mediæval and Modern Art.- In its general acceptation, the term antique art is understood to be that of a period antecedent to the revival of the classical studies in western Europe, or before the risorgimento, or renaissance, of the arts from their assumed period of lethargy. There was, in fact, a distinct character about the productions of the artists of the more ancient and the more modern times, which was sufficiently marked to produce in the best of them a separate style of art. The antique school was distinguished by an anthropomorphism and a divination of the human form; the medieval school was formed on and characterized by a species of contempt for the human figure, and an aspiration after an ideal perfection, and therefore there is something vague and undefined in its efforts to represent the objects it copied, while the modern school has united the indefiniteness of its aim with that clearness of the perception of its objects which is so marked a characteristic of its production. The antique schools date from the dawn of civilization to the end of the 10th century; the medieval schools date from the 10th to the 15th century; and the modern schools have continued the traditions of the masters of art to the present times.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
. See Architecture ; Sculpture ; Painting
What Has Changed in the Last Century
When Collier's wrote this in 1921 it took for granted a firm line between arts that "give pleasure by the immediate impression" and merely "useful" arts, and a tidy sequence in which antique art ran to the 10th century, medieval to the 15th, and modern art carried on the masters' traditions. Both halves of that scheme have gone. The fine art/craft/design hierarchy was attacked from the 1919 Bauhaus onward and is now largely rejected by museums and art schools; photography, film, video, performance and installation have all been admitted as fine arts, and Duchamp's signed urinal of 1917 turned mass-produced objects into exhibits. "Modern art" has also changed meaning entirely: it now names roughly 1860-1970, followed by a contemporary art that no longer defines itself by faithful representation of the human figure at all, and the discipline has abandoned the assumption that only European art counts.
Written for this edition, 2026.