Eric Hod: 2013

Art has not always been what we think it is today.
An object regarded as Art today may not have been perceived as such when it was first made, nor was the person who made it necessarily regarded as an artist. Both the notion of "art" and the idea of the "artist" are relatively modern terms. The Visual Arts aren't only the paintings and sculptures we see in museums and galleries, they are also found in our everyday surroundings

Amazing Graffiti artwork by MTO - Rennes, France

     Many of the objects we identify as art today - Greek painted pottery, medieval manuscript illuminations, and so on - were made in times and places when people had no concept of "art" as we understand the term.
These objects may have been appreciated in various ways and often admired, but not as "art" in the current sense.
The idea of an object being a "work of art" emerges, together with the concept of the Artist, in the 15th and 16th centuries in Italy.

     During the Renaissance, the word Art emerges as a collective term encompassing Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, a grouping given currency by the Italian artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari in the 16th century. Subsequently, this grouping was expanded to include Music and Poetry which became known in the 18th century as
the 'Fine Arts'. These five Arts have formed an irreducible nucleus from which have been generally excluded the 'decorative arts' and 'crafts', such as as pottery, weaving, metalworking, and furniture making, all of which have
utility as an end.

   According to William Rubin, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "there is no single definition of art." and the art historian Thomas McEvilley agrees that today "more or less anything can be designated as art."