Art, the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others. The term art may also designate one of a number of modes of expression conventionally categorized by the medium utilized or the form of the product; thus we speak of painting, sculpture, filmmaking, music, dance, literature, and many other modes of aesthetic expression as arts and of all of them collectively as the arts. The term art may further be employed in order to distinguish a particular object, environment, or experience as an instance of aesthetic expression, allowing us to say, for example, that that drawing or tapestry is art.

Traditionally, the arts are divided into the fine and the liberal arts. The latter are concerned with skill of expression in language, speech, and reasoning. The fine arts, a translation of the French beaux-arts, are more concerned with purely aesthetic ends, or, in short, with the beautiful. Many forms of expression combine aesthetic concerns with utilitarian purposes; pottery, architecture, metalworking, and advertising design may be cited as examples. It may be useful to conceive of the various arts as occupying different regions along a continuum that ranges from purely aesthetic purposes at one end to purely utilitarian purposes at the other. This polarity of purpose is reflected also in the related terms artist and artisan, the latter understood as one who gives considerable attention to the utilitarian. This should by no means be taken as a rigid scheme, however. Even within one form of art, motives may vary widely; thus a potter or a weaver may create a highly functional work–a salad bowl, for example, or a blanket–that is at the same time beautiful, or he may create works that have no purpose whatever beyond being admired.

Another traditional system of classification, applied to the fine arts, establishes such categories as literature (including poetry, drama, story, and so on), the visual arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.), the graphic arts (painting, drawing, design, and other forms expressed on flat surfaces), the plastic arts (sculpture, modeling), the decorative arts (enamelwork, furniture design, mosaic, etc.), the performing arts (theatre, dance, music), music (as composition), and architecture (often including interior design).

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