Charles Davis Aug 25, 2018:

@Lisa "Graphic art" for painting and drawing (also printmaking, and usually photography) is perfectly correct; see for example the first of my three posts. The problem is that that it's not the only way in which "graphic" is used, and in the art world (including the art education world), as opposed to the legal world and various academic disciplines, it usually means something else nowadays; using it to refer to painting and drawing is pretty old-fashioned. Nowadays courses in graphic art are definitely not non-digital; on the contrary. Painting and drawing come under fine art; so does most printmaking, though that straddles graphic art too. So I still think there's a real problem about using "graphic" in school materials in the sense that Spanish uses "gráfico". Which is inconvenient.

However, if you're going to use visual art for "plastic", which is what I usually do, though there are obvious problems with that here, since visual art is a much wider term than "plastic" art as they are using it, then why do you need "graphic" at all? I think you can just omit it. And where they use "gráfico" as opposed to "plástico", you can use a workaround, like "two-dimensional" or whatever fits.

Lisa Mann (asker) Aug 25, 2018:

Encyclopaedia Britannica reference So, I was looking for references to back up my assertion that neither "graphic" nor "plastic" should be part of this term (it appears many times, and often in bold, so it's important the client sees the rationale behind my decision) and I found this reference in Encyclopaedia Britannica. Despite the connotation we all seem to agree on, it says drawing and painting are graphic arts... Plastic is out for sure - I'm going with "visual arts" in other parts of the text - but I'm still on the fence about including the word "graphic"... https://www.britannica.com/topic/the-arts

Charles Davis Aug 24, 2018:

III Here is a modern Spanish definition, which reflects the continuing ambiguity:

"QUÉ SON LAS ARTES PLÁSTICAS
Las artes plásticas son el trabajo con materiales moldeables o que tienen "plasticidad" y al manejarse con diferentes técnicas ayudan a expresar la idea que se quiere comunicar.
Las artes plásticas es formar y conformar ideas con distintos materiales mediante acciones como la pintura y el dibujo (gráficas), y la arquitectura y escultura (plásticas); es decir, las artes plásticas representan un conjunto de acciones y actividades de tipo gráfico-plástico, en donde intervienen la vista y el tacto para apreciarlas y estimularl nuestra imaginación y pensamiento."
http://www.escuelacima.com/quesonlasartesplasticas.html

Charles Davis Aug 24, 2018:

II I think manual or hand-made is a promising approach for this context. That was the original idea of "plastik" when German theorists introduced the term in the early nineteenth century: in art, it has always meant art involving physical manipulation/modification of the medium or material: "hands-on" art. From the outset there was considerable ambiguity about whether "plastic art" was necessarily 3D or whether it included painting. And some of the Germans, notably Schelling and Heine, applied it to poetry too. By the later 19th century the use of "plastic arts" in various languages to refer, basically, to all the visual arts was well established.

In Spanish, the DLE defines "plástico" as "related to plástica", and plástica as "Arte de plasmar, o formar cosas de barro, yeso": inherently 3D. Yet in Spanish school jargon "plástica" just means art: my wife, a teacher, will refer to a colleague from the art department as "profesora de plástica", or to a pupil's marks "en plástica". Strictly speaking it is presumably short for "gráfico-plástica", but this is still ambiguous in Spanish:

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Charles Davis Aug 24, 2018:

I In the language of intellectual property rights, "graphic or plastic art" means exactly this (though for these purposes it includes photographs, which are excluded here):

"For the purposes of this Directive, "original work of art" means works of graphic or plastic art such as pictures, collages, paintings, drawings, engravings, prints, lithographs, sculptures, tapestries, ceramics, glassware and photographs, provided they are made by the artist himself or are copies considered to be original works of art."
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX...

There are plenty more examples of these terms in definitions of "artwork", including that of the American Heritage Dictionary. They are also used in cultural anthropology. And in the nineteenth century they were standard. But it's true that in the modern discourse of art in English, "plastic" is hardly used at all and "graphic" implies something different. So I'm very doubtful whether they would be suitable for modern educational materials.

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philgoddard Aug 24, 2018:

Exactly. That's why you can't use "graphic" - painting is not normally considered a graphic art. But "manual" works, and so does "handmade".

Lisa Mann (asker) Aug 24, 2018:

Phil, I'm thinking manual graphic art? Does that make any sense? The text emphasizes that this is two dimensional, and I'm thinking "art" might be too broad... By "la mayoría de las que has realizado hasta el momento" they mean that as 12-year-olds, most of the art they've done has been two-dimensional drawings or paintings (as opposed to sculpture, photo or video I guess). The problem with "graphic art" to me is that it calls to mind typography, like sign-making, not works by Monet and Picasso...

philgoddard Aug 24, 2018:

We don't know what they mean by "la mayoría de las que has realizado hasta el momento". Are these drawings and paintings too? If so, would "handmade art" work? It's not a perfect translation, because in a sense all visual art is handmade, but in photography and digital art the tools are far more complex than, say, a paintbrush.
If you go with this translation, I think you'd have to say "could be described as" rather than "are described as".

philgoddard Aug 23, 2018:

I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but as an art specialist, I'm not sure this concept exists in English. Gráfico often means two-dimensional, and plástico often means three-dimensional.
In this particular text, if you ignore traditional non-digital still photography and video, you could almost describe the two categories as analogue and digital.