Short answers, pulled from the story.
The arts, or creative arts, are a vast range of human practices involving creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. They span diverse media and are both a dynamic and a constant feature of human life. Through them, humans cultivate social, cultural, and individual identities while transmitting values, ideas, visions, and experiences across time and space.
The arts are divided into visual arts, literature, and performing arts. Visual arts include architecture, ceramic art, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpture. Literature includes fiction, drama, poetry, and prose. Performing arts include dance, music, and theatre.
The traditional seven forms are painting, architecture, sculpture, literature, music, theatre, and filmmaking. Some are derived from others, so drama is literature with acting and dance is music expressed through motion. In Francophone scholarship, television is sometimes called the eighth art and comics the ninth art, le neuvieme art.
Video games are multidisciplinary works with uncontroversial artistic elements like visuals and sound, plus an experience emerging from their interactivity, but people debate whether they qualify as art. Designer Hideo Kojima argued in 2006 that games are a service rather than an art form. Yet in 2011 the National Endowment for the Arts included them in its definition of a work of art, and in 2012 the Smithsonian American Art Museum presented an exhibit titled The Art of the Video Game.
Applied art applies design and decoration to everyday, functional objects to make them aesthetically pleasing, including fields like industrial design, illustration, and commercial art. Fine art is defined as art that aims to produce objects that are beautiful or intellectually stimulating but have no primary everyday function. In practice, the two often overlap.
A strong relationship runs between the arts and power across history. As art responds to news and politics it becomes a focus of controversy and a force of change, while governments use art as propaganda. Writers like Alexander Pushkin and the graffiti artist Banksy have been called free spirits for clashing with authorities. On morality, the Catholic Church declared in 1963 that the arts are not exempt from the absolute primacy of the objective moral order.