The notion of art has always been torn between two opposite yet complementary approaches. Art is opposed to nonart (science, business, entertainment, play, daily life, etc.), and that makes it possible to think of it not only as unique but above all a unified way of doing as well as thinking. Such a “unity in diversity” approach is, however, questioned, or at least strongly nuanced, by our longtime tendency to classify and thus very rapidly hierarchize different forms of art, such as for instance the old-style difference between liberal versus mechanic arts or the more recent distinction between fine arts and applied arts. The very existence of different types of art, all of them now institutionalized as separate disciplines, and their struggle for cultural prominence (we should not forget that the Renaissance term of paragone means less “comparison” than “struggle” between the arts), have not ended with the post-Romantic desire...

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