Short answers, pulled from the story.
The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose aim is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. They include most objects for building interiors, as well as interior design, but typically exclude architecture. Major groupings are ceramic art, metalwork, furniture, jewellery, fashion, textile arts, and glassware.
The decorative arts produce objects that are both beautiful and functional, while the fine arts, namely painting, drawing, photography, and large-scale sculpture, generally produce objects solely for their aesthetic quality and capacity to stimulate the intellect. The distinction arose mainly from the post-renaissance art of the West and is much less meaningful for other cultures and periods.
The Arts and Crafts movement narrowed the lower status given to decorative art against fine art. Born in England in the second half of the 19th century and inspired by Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris, it led to greater appreciation of the decorative arts throughout Europe. In 1882 Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo organized the Century Guild for craftsmen, arguing there was no meaningful difference between the fine and decorative arts.
Until the Copyright Act 1911, only works of fine art had been protected from unauthorized copying. The 1911 Act extended the definition of an artistic work to include works of artistic craftsmanship.
The promotion of the fine arts over the decorative can largely be traced to the Renaissance, when Italian theorists such as Vasari championed values that placed little weight on the cost of materials or the amount of skilled work. They instead valued artistic imagination and the individual touch of a master such as Michelangelo, Raphael, or Leonardo da Vinci.
The view of decoration as a lesser art was formally challenged in the 1970s by writers and art historians such as Amy Goldin and Anne Swartz. The Pattern and Decoration movement in New York galleries in the 1980s, though short-lived, opened the way to a more inclusive evaluation of art objects.
According to Colin Campbell in his piece The Craft Consumer, people select goods with specific intentions in mind in order to alter them, incorporating and changing an object to fit their own lifestyle. One way is to change an object's external appearance through decorative techniques such as decoupage, art cars, truck art in South Asia, and IKEA hacking.