Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Wiktionary
n. 1 (plural of visual art English) 2 Art forms that are primarily visual in nature, such as painting, photography, printmaking, and filmmaking.
Wikipedia
The visual arts are art forms such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, photography, video, filmmaking and architecture. Many artistic disciplines ( performing arts, conceptual art, textile arts) involve aspects of the visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design and decorative art.
Current usage of the term "visual arts" includes fine art as well as the applied, decorative arts and crafts, but this was not always the case. Before the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain and elsewhere at the turn of the 20th century, the term 'artist' was often restricted to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the handicraft, craft, or applied art media. The distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts Movement, who valued vernacular art forms as much as high forms. Art schools made a distinction between the fine arts and the crafts, maintaining that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of the arts.
The increasing tendency to privilege painting, and to a lesser degree sculpture, above other arts has been a feature of Western art as well as East Asian art. In both regions painting has been seen as relying to the highest degree on the imagination of the artist, and the furthest removed from manual labour - in Chinese painting the most highly valued styles were those of "scholar-painting", at least in theory practiced by gentleman amateurs. The Western hierarchy of genres reflected similar attitudes.
Usage examples of "visual arts".
Sidney told me, scowling in the direction of the Senior Inspector, 'has asked me, in addition to creative and visual arts and all the other multifarious jobs I have to do, to be responsible for sex education, drugs awareness and anti-bullying.
The visual arts soon followed suit, architecture having already led the way in establishing the links between visual art and mathematics.
In her voice was much the same contempt her employer had expressed for visual arts.
I could even pick a visual arts style, from expressionism to surrealism, if you'd like.
The Manhattan State Institute of Visual Arts was a six-story building looking more like a corkscrew than anything.
A capacity for imaginative projection into the lifeworld, thought, and language of another person, whether living or dead, through music, literature, the visual arts, or conversationthis is the ethical burden of agape in the arts.
His love of the visual arts would be a lifelong affair, even if his attempts at writing for the stage were a failure.
Music--except for opera--had fared better, as had the visual arts.
Music - except for opera - had fared better, as had the visual arts.
A classic example of that peculiar sub-genre of the visual arts known as Politics, American, Crass Beyond Belief.