Decorative arts

[citation needed] A similar fate has befallen tapestry, which late medieval and Renaissance royalty regarded as the most magnificent artform, and was certainly the most expensive.

The Pattern and Decoration movement in New York galleries in the 1980s, though short-lived, opened the way to a more inclusive evaluation of the value of art objects.

Illuminated manuscripts have a much higher survival rate, especially in the hands of the church, as there was little value in the materials and they were easy to store.

[citation needed] The promotion of the fine arts over the decorative in European thought can largely be traced to the Renaissance, when Italian theorists such as Vasari promoted artistic values, exemplified by the artists of the High Renaissance, that placed little value on the cost of materials or the amount of skilled work required to produce a work, but instead valued artistic imagination and the individual touch of the hand of a supremely gifted master such as Michelangelo, Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci, reviving to some extent the approach of antiquity.

This aesthetic movement of the second half of the 19th century was born in England and inspired by the writings of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and William Morris.

Many converts, both from professional artists' ranks and from among the intellectual class as a whole, helped spread the ideas of the movement.

According to Colin Campbell in his piece “The Craft Consumer”,[8] this is done by selecting goods with specific intentions in mind to alter them.