Learn English – the opposite of “commercial” art

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What is the opposite of commercial in the context of writing about art? For example:

The artist created both commercial and _________ art.

Best Answer

(Updated) The obvious counterparts would seem to be High Art:

Much of high culture consists of the appreciation of what is sometimes called "High Art". This term ... besides literature includes music, visual arts (especially painting), and traditional forms of the performing arts (including some cinema). The decorative arts would not generally be considered High Art.

The cultural products most often regarded as forming part of high culture are most likely to have been produced during periods of High civilization, for which a large, sophisticated and wealthy urban-based society provides a coherent and conscious aesthetic framework, and a large-scale milieu of training, and, for the visual arts, sourcing materials and financing work. Such an environment enables artists, as near as possible, to realize their creative potential with as few as possible practical and technical constraints.

- or Fine Art:

Fine art, from the 17th century on, has meant art forms developed primarily for aesthetics, distinguishing them from applied arts that also have to serve some practical function. Historically, the five main fine arts were painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry, with minor arts including theater and dance. Today, the fine arts commonly include additional forms, including film, photography, conceptual art, and printmaking. However, in some institutes of learning or in museums, fine art and frequently the term fine arts (pl.) as well, are associated exclusively with visual art forms.

One definition of fine art is "a visual art considered to have been created primarily for aesthetic and intellectual purposes and judged for its beauty and meaningfulness, specifically, painting, sculpture, drawing, watercolor, graphics, and architecture." In that sense, there are conceptual differences between the Fine Arts and the Applied Arts. As originally conceived, and as understood for much of the modern era, the perception of aesthetic qualities required a refined judgement usually referred to as having good taste, which differentiated fine art from popular art and entertainment. However in the Postmodern era, the value of good taste is disappearing, to the point that having bad taste has become synonymous with being avant-garde.

The word "fine" does not so much denote the quality of the artwork in question, but the purity of the discipline.

As implict in the latter article, there seems to be significant overlap between the two terms:

...today there is an escalation of media in which high art is more recognized to occur.

- although Google Ngrams appears to show that the latter term is, in fact, more frequently used in the English corpus. (Drilling down to British English shows a smaller gap between the two.)

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