as someone who has formally studied the history of art and literature, my favorite things to study are always the "common" arts. vernacular design; material culture; and the pamphlets, ceramics, prints, and clothing forms we have zillions of extant examples of because they sold like hot cakes and workshops could only barely churn them out fast enough to meet demand. some sectors of art history scholarship are quite set on excluding "crafts" from "the arts," when, from my view, crafts are obviously a subsection of the arts, not a whole different category, and modes of "crafts" routinely get promoted to "arts" when heavyweight scholars take interest in them. it's like, mate, if you're calling yourself a serious art historian and you genuinely think that these eighteenth century tentacle porn prints are of zero intellectual or artistic value then that is your limitation as a scholar, not an inherent deficiency of the works. popular arts are exactly as worthy of respect and considered study as fine arts.
this is why it bugs me to no end to see people dismiss current popular art out of hand as completely unworthwhile in the name of fostering greater appreciation for the arts. hobby art, folk art, crafts, pop art, etc., they are all still very much art and it is valuable to treat them as such. to discount, for example, booktok romantasy novels as obviously bad and "not that deep" and label them as completely devoid of substance is, to me, a fundamentally incurious position to take. if I may say something a little bit meaner, it also strikes me as an excuse to be intellectually lazy and avoid having to learn anything new or subjectively unpleasant; it's a thought terminating cliche. and before anyone says anything, no, taking a work or genre or medium seriously does not automatically mean viewing it as Good or sacrosanct, I have ideological and aesthetic issues with much of the art canon, it means taking it seriously. dismissing huge swathes of the arts as unworthy of intellectual consideration is not a pro-art or pro-intellectual argument.
"these eighteenth century What Now" okay I have some bad news: I misremembered the date of this work, it's early nineteenth century, not eighteenth century. second, I have some good news: here is the image I had in mind. I really cannot stress enough that if you open that wikipedia link then you will see a sexually explicit woodblock print of a woman engaging carnally with a pair of octopodes, so you have been warned. art historian beware etc etc.
