American Institute of Architects
The American Institute of Architects is a professional organization for architects in the United States. Headquartered in Washington, D. C. the AIA offers education, government advocacy, community redevelopment, public outreach to support the architecture profession and improve its public image. The AIA works with other members of the design and construction team to help coordinate the building industry; the AIA is headed by Robert Ivy, FAIA as EVP/Chief Executive Officer and William J. Bates, FAIA as 2019 AIA President; the American Institute of Architects was founded in New York City in 1857 by a group of 13 architects to "promote the scientific and practical perfection of its members" and "elevate the standing of the profession." This initial group included Charles Babcock, Henry W. Cleaveland, Henry Dudley, Leopold Eidlitz, Edward Gardiner, Richard Morris Hunt, Fred A. Petersen, Jacob Wrey Mould, John Welch, Richard M. Upjohn and Joseph C. Wells, with Richard Upjohn serving as the first president.
They met on February 23, 1857, decided to invite 16 other prominent architects to join them, including Alexander Jackson Davis, Thomas U. Walter, Calvert Vaux. Prior to their establishment of the AIA, anyone could claim to be an architect, as there were no schools of architecture or architectural licensing laws in the United States, they drafted a constitution and bylaws by March 10, 1857, under the name New York Society of Architects. Thomas U. Walter, of Philadelphia suggested the name be changed to American Institute of Architects; the members signed the new constitution on April 15, 1857, having filed a certificate of incorporation two days earlier. The constitution was amended the following year with the mission "to promote the artistic and practical profession of its members. Architects in other cities were asking to join in the 1860s, by the 1880s chapters had been formed in Albany, Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, San Francisco, St. Louis, Washington, D. C; as of 2008, AIA had more than 300 chapters.
The AIA is headquartered at 1735 New York Avenue, NW in Washington, D. C. A design competition was held in the mid-1960s to select an architect for a new AIA headquarters in Washington. Mitchell/Giurgola won the design competition but failed to get approval of the design concept from the United States Commission of Fine Arts; the firm resigned the commission and helped select The Architects Collaborative to redesign the building. The design, led by TAC principals Norman Fletcher and Howard Elkus, was approved in 1970 and completed in 1973. In honor of the 150th anniversary of the organization, the building was formally renamed in 2007 the "American Center for Architecture" and is home to the American Institute of Architecture Students, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the National Architectural Accrediting Board. More than 90,000 licensed architects and associated professionals are members. AIA members adhere to a code of ethics and professional conduct intended to assure clients, the public, colleagues of an architect's dedication to the highest standards in professional practice.
There are five levels of membership in the AIA: Architect members are licensed to practice architecture by a licensing authority in the United States. Associate members are not licensed to practice architecture but they are working under the supervision of an architect in a professional or technical capacity, have earned professional degrees in architecture, are faculty members in a university program in architecture, or are interns earning credit toward licensure. International associate members hold an architecture license or the equivalent from a licensing authority outside the United States. Emeritus members have been AIA members for 15 successive years and are at least 70 years of age or are incapacitated and unable to work in the architecture profession. Allied members are individuals whose professions are related to the building and design community, such as engineers, landscape architects, or planners. Allied membership is a partnership with the American Architectural Foundation. There is no National AIA membership category for students, but they can become members of the American Institute of Architecture Students and many local and state chapters of the AIA have student membership categories.
The AIA's most prestigious honor is the designation of a member as a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. This membership is awarded to members who have made contributions of national significance to the profession. More than 2,600, or 2% of all members, have been elevated to the AIA College of Fellows. Foreign architects of prominence may be elected to the College as Honorary Fellows of the AIA; the AIA has a staff of more than 200 employees. Although the AIA functions as a national organization, its 217 local and state chapters provide members with programming and direct services to support them throughout their professional lives; the chapters cover the entirety of its territories. Components operate in the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, the Middle East, Hong Kong and Canada. By speaking with a united voice, AIA architects influence government practices that affect the practice of the profession and the quality of American life; the AIA monitors legislative and regulator
Boroughs of New York City
New York City encompasses five county-level administrative divisions called boroughs: The Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island. All boroughs are part of New York City, each of the boroughs is coextensive with a respective county, the primary administrative subdivision within New York state. Queens and the Bronx are concurrent with the counties of the same name, while Manhattan and Staten Island correspond to New York and Richmond counties respectively. Boroughs have existed since the consolidation of the city in 1898, when the city and each borough assumed their current boundaries. However, the boroughs have not always been coextensive with their respective counties; the borough of the Bronx had earlier been in the southern part of Westchester County—which had been annexed to New York County in two stages in 1874 and 1895—and in 1914, the county was created to match the borough. Before 1899, the county of Queens included an eastern part, split-off during the consolidation to become Nassau County.
The term borough was adopted to describe a form of governmental administration for each of the five fundamental constituent parts of the newly consolidated city in 1898. Under the 1898 City Charter adopted by the New York State Legislature, a "borough" is a municipal corporation, created when a county is merged with populated areas within it; the limited powers of the borough governments are inferior to the authority of the Government of New York City, contrasting with other borough administrations of government used in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, where a borough is an independent level of government, as well as borough forms used in other states and in Greater London. New York City is referred to collectively as the five boroughs; the term is used by politicians to counter a frequent focus on Manhattan and thereby to place all five boroughs on equal footing. In the same vein, the term outer boroughs refers to all of the boroughs excluding Manhattan though the geographic center of the city is along the Brooklyn–Queens border.
All five boroughs were created in 1898 during consolidation, when the city's current boundaries were established. The Bronx included parts of New York County outside of Manhattan, ceded by neighboring Westchester County in two stages. In 1914, the present-day separate Bronx County became the last county to be created in the State of New York; the borough of Queens consists of what was only the western part of a then-larger Queens County. In 1899, the three eastern towns of Queens County that had not joined the city the year before—the towns of Hempstead, North Hempstead, Oyster Bay—formally seceded from Queens County to form the new Nassau County; the borough of Staten Island, concurrent with Richmond County, was the borough of Richmond until the name was changed in 1975 to reflect its common appellation, while leaving the name of the county unchanged. There are hundreds of distinct neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs of New York City, many with a definable history and character to call their own.
Manhattan is the most densely populated borough. Manhattan's population density of 72,033 people per square mile in 2015 makes it the highest of any county in the United States and higher than the density of any individual U. S. city. Manhattan is the cultural and financial center of New York City and contains the headquarters of many major multinational corporations, the United Nations Headquarters, Wall Street, a number of important universities. Manhattan is described as the cultural, financial and entertainment capital of the world. Most of the borough is situated at the mouth of the Hudson River. Several small islands are part of the borough of Manhattan, including Randall's Island, Wards Island, Roosevelt Island in the East River, Governors Island to the south in New York Harbor. Manhattan Island is loosely divided into Lower and Uptown regions. Uptown Manhattan is divided by Central Park into the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side, above the park is Harlem; the borough includes a small neighborhood on the United States mainland, called Marble Hill.
Marble Hill was part of Manhattan Island, but is now contiguous with the Bronx after having been severed from Manhattan Island by the construction of the Harlem River Ship Canal south of the neighborhood, having been connected to the mainland by the subsequent filling in of the Harlem River's original path to the neighborhood's north. New York City's remaining four boroughs are collectively referred to as the outer boroughs. Brooklyn, on the western tip of Long Island, is the city's most populous borough. Brooklyn is known for its cultural and ethnic diversity, an independent art scene, distinct neighborhoods, a distinctive architectural heritage. Downtown Brooklyn is the largest central core neighborhood in the outer boroughs; the borough has a long beachfront shoreline including Coney Island, established in the 1870s as one of the earliest amusement grounds in the country. Marine Park and Prospect Park are the two largest parks in Brooklyn. Since 2010, Brooklyn has evolv
Art Students League of New York
The Art Students League of New York is an art school located on West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City, New York. The League has been known for its broad appeal to both amateurs and professional artists and for over 130 years has maintained a tradition of offering reasonably priced classes on a flexible schedule to accommodate students from all walks of life. Although artists may study full-time, there have never been any degree programs or grades, this informal attitude pervades the culture of the school. From the 19th century to the present, the League has counted among its attendees and instructors many important artists, contributed to numerous influential schools and movements in the art world; the League maintains a significant permanent collection of student and faculty work, publishes an online journal of writing on art-related topics, entitled LINEA. The journal's name refers to the school's motto Nulla Dies Sine Linea or "No Day Without a Line," traditionally attributed to the famous Greek painter Apelles by the historian Pliny the Elder, who recorded that Apelles would not let a day pass without at least drawing a line to practice his art.
Founded in 1875, the League's creation came about in response to both an anticipated gap in the program of the National Academy of Design's program of classes for that year, longer-term desires for more variety and flexibility in education for artists. The breakaway group of students included many women, was housed in rented rooms at 16th Street and Fifth Avenue; when the Academy resumed a more typical, but liberalized, program, in 1877, there was some sentiment that the League had served its purpose, but its students voted to continue its program, it was incorporated in 1878. Influential board members from this formative period included painter Thomas Eakins and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Membership continued to increase, forcing the League to relocate to larger spaces. In 1889, the League participated in the founding of the American Fine Arts Society, together with the Society of American Artists and the Architectural League, among others; the American Fine Arts Building at 215 West 57th Street, constructed as their joint headquarters, has continued to house the League since 1892.
Designed in the French Renaissance style by one of the founders of the AFAS, architect Henry Hardenbergh, the building is a designated New York City Landmark and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the late 1890s and early 1900s an increasing number of women artists came to study and work at the League many of them taking on key roles. Among them was a young Miss Wilhelmina Weber Furlong and her husband Thomas Furlong; the avant-garde couple served the league in executive and administrative roles and as student members throughout the American modernism movement. Alice Van Vechten Brown, who would develop some of the first art programs in American higher education studied with the league until prolonged family illness sent her home; the painter Edith Dimock, a student from 1895 to 1899, described her classes at the Art Students League: In a room innocent of ventilation, the job was to draw Venus and her colleagues. We were not allowed to hitch bodies to the heads——yet; the dead white plaster of Paris was a perfect inducer of eye-strain, was called "The Antique."
One was supposed to work from "The Antique" for two years. The advantage of "The Antique" was that all these gods and athletes were such excellent models: there never was the twitch of an iron-bound muscle. Venus never batted her hard-boiled egg eye, the Discus-thrower never wearied, they were cheap models and did not have to be paid union rates. In his official biography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, Norman Rockwell recounts his time studying at the school as a young man, providing insight into its operation in the early 1900s; the League's popularity persisted into the 1920s and 1930s under the hand of instructors like painter Thomas Hart Benton, who counted among his students there the young Jackson Pollock and other avant-garde artists who would rise to prominence in the 1940s. In the years after World War II, the G. I. Bill played an important role in the continuing history of the League by enabling returning veterans to attend classes; the League continued to be a formative influence on innovative artists, being an early stop in the careers of Abstract expressionists, Pop Artists and scores of others including Lee Bontecou, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Held, Eva Hesse, Roy Lichtenstein, Donald Judd, Knox Martin, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Cy Twombly and many others vitally active in the art world.
The League's unique importance in the larger art world dwindled somewhat during the 1960s because of higher academia's emergence as an important presence in contemporary art education, due to a shift in the art world towards minimalism, conceptual art, a more impersonal and indirect approach to art making. As of 2010, the League remains an important part of New York City art life; the League continues to attract a wide variety of young artists. From 1906 until 1922, again after the end of World War II from 1947 until 1979, the League operated a summer school of painting at Woodstock, New York. In 1995, the League's facilities expanded to include the Vytlacil campus in Sparkill, New York, named after and based upon a gift of the prop
Interior design
Interior design is the art and science of enhancing the interior of a building to achieve a healthier and more aesthetically pleasing environment for the people using the space. An interior designer is someone who plans, researches and manages such projects. Interior design is a multifaceted profession that includes conceptual development, space planning, site inspections, research, communicating with the stakeholders of a project, construction management, execution of the design. In the past, interiors were put together instinctively as a part of the process of building; the profession of interior design has been a consequence of the development of society and the complex architecture that has resulted from the development of industrial processes. The pursuit of effective use of space, user well-being and functional design has contributed to the development of the contemporary interior design profession; the profession of interior design is separate and distinct from the role of interior decorator, a term used in the US.
The term is less common in the UK, where the profession of interior design is still unregulated and therefore speaking, not yet a profession. In ancient India, architects used to work as interior designers; this can be seen from the references of Vishwakarma the architect - one of the gods in Indian mythology. Additionally, the sculptures depicting ancient texts and events are seen in palaces built in 17th-century India. In medieval times wall art paintings in India have been a common feature of palace like mansions known as havelis. While most traditional homes are done away with modern buildings, there are around 2000 havelis in the Shekhawati region of Rajashtan that display wall art paintings. In ancient Egypt, "soul houses" or models of houses were placed in tombs as receptacles for food offerings. From these, it is possible to discern details about the interior design of different residences throughout the different Egyptian dynasties, such as changes in ventilation, columns, loggias and doors.
Throughout the 17th and 18th century and into the early 19th century, interior decoration was the concern of the homemaker, or an employed upholsterer or craftsman who would advise on the artistic style for an interior space. Architects would employ craftsmen or artisans to complete interior design for their buildings. In the mid-to-late 19th century, interior design services expanded as the middle class in industrial countries grew in size and prosperity and began to desire the domestic trappings of wealth to cement their new status. Large furniture firms began to branch out into general interior design and management, offering full house furnishings in a variety of styles; this business model flourished from the mid-century to 1914, when this role was usurped by independent amateur, designers. This paved the way for the emergence of the professional interior design in the mid-20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, upholsterers began to expand their business remits, they framed their business more broadly and in artistic terms and began to advertise their furnishings to the public.
To meet the growing demand for contract interior work on projects such as offices and public buildings, these businesses became much larger and more complex, employing builders, plasterers, textile designers and furniture designers, as well as engineers and technicians to fulfil the job. Firms began to publish and circulate catalogs with prints for different lavish styles to attract the attention of expanding middle classes; as department stores increased in number and size, retail spaces within shops were furnished in different styles as examples for customers. One effective advertising tool was to set up model rooms at national and international exhibitions in showrooms for the public to see; some of the pioneering firms in this regard were Waring & Gillow, James Shoolbred and Holland & Sons. These traditional high-quality furniture making firms began to play an important role as advisers to unsure middle class customers on taste and style, began taking out contracts to design and furnish the interiors of many important buildings in Britain.
This type of firm emerged in America after the Civil War. The Herter Brothers, founded by two German emigre brothers, began as an upholstery warehouse and became one of the first firms of furniture makers and interior decorators. With their own design office and cabinet-making and upholstery workshops, Herter Brothers were prepared to accomplish every aspect of interior furnishing including decorative paneling and mantels and ceiling decoration, patterned floors, carpets and draperies. A pivotal figure in popularizing theories of interior design to the middle class was the architect Owen Jones, one of the most influential design theorists of the nineteenth century. Jones' first project was his most important—in 1851, he was responsible for not only the decoration of Joseph Paxton’s gigantic Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition but the arrangement of the exhibits within, he chose a controversial palette of red and blue for the interior ironwork and, despite initial negative publicity in the newspapers, was unveiled by Queen Victoria to much critical acclaim.
His most significant publication was The Grammar of Ornament, in which Jones formulated 37 key principles of interior design and decoration. Jones was employed by some of the leading interior design firms of the day. In 1882, the London Directory of the Post Of
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP is an American architectural, urban planning, engineering firm. It was formed in Chicago in 1936 by Nathaniel Owings; the firm opened their first branch in New York City in 1937, has since expanded all over the world, with regional offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D. C. London, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Dubai. With a portfolio spanning thousands of projects across 50 countries, SOM is one of the largest architectural firms in the world, their primary expertise is in high-end commercial buildings. They have designed several of the tallest buildings in the world, including the John Hancock Center, Willis Tower, Burj Khalifa. SOM provides services in Architecture, Building Services/MEP Engineering, Digital Design, Interior Design, Structural Engineering, Civil Engineering, Sustainable Design and Urban Design & Planning. Many of SOM's post-war designs have become icons of American modern architecture, including the Manhattan House, designated as a New York City landmark in 2007 by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Although SOM was one of the first major modern American architectural firms to promote a corporate face, many famous architects and interior designers have been associated with the various national offices. Due to their faithful following of Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe's ideas, Frank Lloyd Wright nicknamed them "The Three Blind Mies". Notable SOM architects include: Edward Charles Bassett, Natalie de Blois, Gordon Bunshaft, David Childs, Robert Diamant, Myron Goldsmith, Bruce Graham, Gary Haney, Gertrude Kerbis, Fazlur Rahman Khan. Lucien Lagrange, Walter Netsch, Larry Oltmanns, Brigitte Peterhans, Adrian Smith, Marilyn Jordan Taylor The earliest amongst the many SOM engineers was John O. Merrill. Fazlur Khan, another engineer at SOM, is considered "the greatest structural engineer of the second half of the 20th century". Indeed, Khan is responsible for developing the algorithms that made the Hancock building and many subsequent skyscrapers possible. Another notable SOM engineer is Bill Baker, best known as the engineer of Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest manmade structure.
To support the tower's record heights and slim footprint, he developed the "buttressed core" structural system, consisting of a hexagonal core reinforced by three buttresses that form a Y shape. Davis Allen, a pioneer in corporate interior design, had a forty-year tenure at SOM. Throughout its history, SOM has been recognized with more than 1,700 awards for quality and innovation. More than 900 of these awards have been received since 1998. In 1996 and 1962, SOM received the Architecture Firm Award from the American Institute of Architects, which recognizes the design work of an entire firm. SOM is the only firm to have received this honor twice. In August 2009 SOM received four of 13 available R+D Awards from Architect Magazine. In addition, a collaboration between SOM and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, The Center for Architecture and Ecology, was honored with a fifth award. SOM has completed over 10,000 projects around the United States and in more than 50 other countries around the world, maintains offices in Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.
C. London, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Abu Dhabi. Smaller field offices supplement these in locations such as the Philippines. Burj Khalifa is the tallest man-made structure built, at 829.8 m. Construction began on September 21, 2004, the building opened on January 4, 2010; the tower's architect and engineer was Skidmore and Merrill. George J. Efstathiou was the Managing Partner for the project. Bill Baker, the Chief Structural Engineer for the project, invented the buttressed core structural system in order to enable the tower to achieve such heights economically. Adrian Smith, who worked with Skidmore and Merrill until 2006, was the Consulting Design Partner; the primary builder is a joint venture of South Korean Samsung C&T, who built the Taipei 101 and Petronas Twin Towers and Arabtec. One World Trade Center known as the Freedom Tower, is located in Manhattan, New York City, is 1,776 ft high, making it the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. After Daniel Libeskind won the competition for master-planning, SOM was awarded the architectural design contract for the Freedom Tower, despite having withdrawn their entry in the original design competition.
The Beacon is one of the largest condominium complexes in San Francisco. It was designed by SOM; the Rockwell Center is a high-end mixed-use area in Makati City, Philippines. It is a project of Rockwell Land Corporation, in turn owned by the Lopez Holdings Corporation. Rockwell Center was first developed in 1998 and is being expanded since 2012, carried out the design under the direction of former design partner Larry Oltmanns In addition to architectural services, Skidmore and Merrill has competed in the field of large scale planning programs and is one of the most awarded urban planning and design groups in the world. An example of one importa
Sheila Johnson
Sheila Crump Johnson is an American businesswoman, co-founder of BET, CEO of Salamander Hotels and Resorts, the first African-American woman to attain a net worth of at least one billion dollars. Johnson is team president, managing partner, governor of the WNBA's Washington Mystics, a position she earned before the 2005 season. On May 24, 2005, Washington Sports and Entertainment Chairman, Abe Pollin, sold the Mystics to Lincoln Holdings LLC, where Johnson served as president, she is the first African-American woman to be an owner or partner in three professional sports franchises: the Washington Capitals, the Washington Wizards, the Washington Mystics. Johnson is CEO of Salamander Hospitality, a company she founded in 2005. Salamander's portfolio includes: Reunion Resort located in Florida. Sheila Johnson was born on January 25, 1949 in McKeesport, the daughter of a neurosurgeon father who worked for the Veterans Administration, an accountant mother, she was educated at Proviso East High School in Maywood and the University of Illinois.
Johnson is a Global Ambassador for a humanitarian organization fighting global poverty. Sheila's I Am Powerful Challenge raised over $8 million in 2007, she serves as Chair of the Board of Governors of Parsons The New School for Design in New York and funded the opening of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, combining classrooms, public program spaces and galleries, she sits on the boards of VH1's Save the Music Foundation, Americans for the Arts, the Curry School of Education Foundation at the University of Virginia, the University of Illinois Foundation. Johnson is the Ambassador for the Healthy Site Institute, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of Sigma Alpha Iota music fraternity. Johnson's first film, Kicking It, premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, UT, she served as sole executive producer on her second film, A Powerful Noise, which premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival in New York. For 33 years from 1969–2002, she was married to Robert L. Johnson.
Together they founded the entertainment network BET. They sold the company to Viacom in 1999, they have two children. In an interview, Sheila Johnson said she. "I don't watch it. I suggest to my kids that they don't watch it," she said. "When we started BET, it was going to be the Ebony magazine on television. We had public affairs programming. We had news... I had a show called Teen Summit, we had a large variety of programming, but the problem is that the video revolution started up... And something started happening, I didn't like it at all, and I remember during those days we would sit up and watch these videos and decide which ones were going on and which ones were not. We got a lot of backlash from recording artists... and we had to start showing them. I didn't like the way women were being portrayed in these videos."After her divorce from Robert L. Johnson in 2002, she was estimated to be worth about $670 million. In 2009, Forbes magazine estimated her net worth to be $400 million. In May 2017, Johnson's net worth was placed at $750 million.
On September 24, 2005, she married Arlington County Circuit Court Chief Judge William T. Newman, who had presided over her divorce from Robert L. Johnson in 2003; the couple first met three decades earlier. In 2007 Johnson was honored as one of the Library of Virginia's "Virginia Women in History" for her career and her contributions to society. Johnson is a Democrat, although in 2009 she endorsed Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell. In early October 2009, Johnson mocked the stutter of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds at a rally for McDonnell's campaign, she apologized. In April 2010, Johnson condemned Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell for his proclamation honoring Confederate History Month because it omitted any reference to slavery. Johnson's biography at the Library of Virginia Designer Luxury Silk Scarves, Wearable Art by Sheila Johnson
Fine art
In European academic traditions, fine art is art developed for aesthetics or beauty, distinguishing it from applied art, which has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork. The five main fine arts were painting, architecture and poetry, with performing arts including theatre and dance; the old master print and drawing were included as related forms to painting, just as prose forms of literature were to poetry. Today, the range of what would be considered fine arts includes additional modern forms, such as film, video production/editing and conceptual art. One definition of fine art is "a visual art considered to have been created for aesthetic and intellectual purposes and judged for its beauty and meaningfulness painting, drawing, watercolor and architecture." In that sense, there are conceptual differences between the applied arts. As conceived, as understood for much of the modern era, the perception of aesthetic qualities required a refined judgment referred to as having good taste, which differentiated fine art from popular art and entertainment.
The word "fine" does not so much denote the quality of the artwork in question, but the purity of the discipline according to traditional Western European canons. Except in the case of architecture, where a practical utility was accepted, this definition excluded the "useful" applied or decorative arts, the products of what were regarded as crafts. In contemporary practice these distinctions and restrictions have become meaningless, as the concept or intention of the artist is given primacy, regardless of the means through which this is expressed. According to some writers the concept of a distinct category of fine art is an invention of the early modern period in the West. Larry Shiner in his The Invention of Art: A Cultural History locates the invention in the 18th century: "There was a traditional “system of the arts” in the West before the eighteenth century. In that system, an artist or artisan was a skilled maker or practitioner, a work of art was the useful product of skilled work, the appreciation of the arts was integrally connected with their role in the rest of life.
“Art”, in other words, meant the same thing as the Greek word techne, or in English “skill”, a sense that has survived in phrases like “the art of war”, “the art of love”, “the art of medicine.” Similar ideas have been expressed by Paul Oskar Kristeller, Pierre Bourdieu, Terry Eagleton, though the point of invention is placed earlier, in the Italian Renaissance. The decline of the concept of "fine art" is dated by George Kubler and others to around 1880, when it "fell out of fashion" as, by about 1900, folk art came to be regarded as of equal significance. ""fine art" was driven out of use by about 1920 by the exponents of industrial design... who opposed a double standard of judgment for works of art and for useful objects". This was among theoreticians; the separation of arts and crafts that exists in Europe and the US is not shared by all other cultures. In Japanese aesthetics, the activities of everyday life are depicted by integrating not only art with craft but man-made with nature. Traditional Chinese art distinguished within Chinese painting between the landscape literati painting of scholar gentlemen and the artisans of the schools of court painting and sculpture.
A high status was given to many things that would be seen as craft objects in the West, in particular ceramics, jade carving and embroidery. Latin American art was dominated by European colonialism until the 20th-century, when indigenous art began to reassert itself inspired by the Constructivist Movement, which reunited arts with crafts based upon socialist principles. In Africa, Yoruba art has a political and spiritual function; as with the art of the Chinese, the art of the Yoruba is often composed of what would ordinarily be considered in the West to be craft production. Some of its most admired manifestations, such as sculpture and textiles, fall in this category. Drawing is one of the major forms of the visual arts. Common instruments include: graphite pencils and ink, inked brushes, wax color pencils, charcoals, pastels, stylus, or various metals like silverpoint. There are a number including cartooning and creating comics. There remains debate whether the following is considered a part of “drawing” as “fine art”: "doodling", drawing in the fog a shower and leaving an imprint on the bathroom mirror, or the surrealist method of "entopic graphomania", in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, the lines are made between the dots.
Mosaics are images formed with small pieces of glass, called tesserae. They can be functional. An artist who designs and makes mosaics is called a mosaicist. Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing on paper. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable of producing multiples of the same piece, called a print; each print is considered an original, as opposed to a copy. The reasoning behind this is that the print is not a reproduction of another work of art in a different medium — for instance, a painting — but rather an image designed from inception as a print. An individual print is referred to as an impression. Prints ar
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