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Oxford English Dictionary –
The application of skill to the arts of imitation and design, painting, engraving, sculpture, architecture, music, dance; the cultivation of these in its principles, practice, and results; the skillful production of the beautiful in visible forms.
This is the most usual modern sense of art, when used without any qualification. It does not occur in any English Dictionary before 1880, and seems to have been chiefly used by painters and writers on painting, until the present century.
Human skill as an agent, human workmanship. Opposed to nature.
1839 Longfellow Hyperion iii. v. (1865) 165 Nature is a revelation of God; Art, a revelation of man‥Art pre-exists in Nature, and Nature is reproduced in Art.
