Among the nine Muses, under the aegis of which art was placed, none incarnates painting or the sculpture: in Antiquity and with the Middle Ages, only arts the language and the productions of the spirit are worthy to constitute. The liberal arts, i.e. free of the constraints related to the matter, are opposed to the mechanical arts, structures, sculpture, painting and goldsmithery, until the Rebirth: at this point in time, within a new category, that of the fine arts, painting is seen set up in supreme art.  

This mobility of the field of application of art in the Occidental culture is found besides in other civilizations, where art follows an autonomous development - until the contemporary art, which, fruit of the Occident, is universal in its practice.

To understand art today, it is to wonder about its formation processes: by which routes, with which exclusions? To admit that the “beautiful ideal” is only one expression of art among others, it is to give the means of an approach right and without prejudices of the Muslim art, of arts African, Oceanian, Amerindian, of the art of the Far East. To relativize the works of art, by considering them in a historical unfolding and their reports at the companies which produce them and receive them, allows to apprehend in its major significances the whole of the human productions gathered under the generic term of “art”.  

Art, social phenomenon, fulfill three essential functions: instrument of a mission, carrying a message, it expresses, by plastic choices and an adapted iconography, a political discourse or social, a religious faith, a personal thought; expression of its own ideal, it falls under a process of progress or decline according to a certain idea of the “beautiful ideal”; finally, it can be associated with a simple play activity.  

Art takes up, as of its origin, a duty symbolic system by which the company structure its imaginary collective, formats its vision of the world, expresses its aspirations and its contradictions. Work is not a simple imitation of the outside world, but the organization of a system of signs depending on the state of the art and mentalities. Index of the aptitude of the man to be exceeded towards one elsewhere of which it inventive, art breaks the limits of its temporal condition and enables him to become its own creator.  

The exercise of art is inseparable from the speech which produces it. This speech, initially diffuse and immanent at the company, will become autonomous with the Rebirth. Through the writings of painters, the theoretical quarrels, continues the development of a reflection on the report which the ideal and work maintain, and an art history and a criticism are set up. This theorization of art is accompanied by a transformation of the statute of the artist who, of simple craftsman owner of a technical know-how, becomes creator, to the image of God.

In parallel, work is promoted with the row of intellectual production, and the front of the scene is occupied by architecture, the sculpture and painting. The music is forgotten for a time by the theoretical debates on the Beautiful; other arts are known as “minors” and are relegated in the field of the ethnology, of popular and exotic arts.

But the upheavals sociopolitic, the divorce of the State and the artist, the accession of the middle-class to the culture, the colonial adventure and the World Fairs, the exhaustion of academic art placed art, with the threshold of the XXe century, from the point of view either only esthetic, but historical and sociological. It is resulted from it the rehabilitation from the minor arts, the accession of non-European arts to the row of arts except for whole and the birth of the modern art.