Open AccessUna de las más acaloradas discusiones que se suscitaron en el campo del arte a partir de la organización de la enseñanza académica es la distinción entre artes mayores y artes menores, o entre bellas artes y artes decorativas. Tal valoración surge por la desavenencia entre lo bello y lo útil, considerado este último concepto como inferior. Durante el siglo XIX el ornamento se connota negativamente, con lo superficial, con el mal gusto. Esta falta de gusto se considera caracteristica de los pobres, de los incultos, de todos aquellos que van quedando afuera del sistema que al calor de las revoluciones industriales intensifica su desarrollo. Pero también, curiosamente, esta infravaloración se relaciona con el carácter femenino.
One of the most passionate debates when it came to structuring the teaching of Fine Arts was the differentiation between Fine Arts and crafts, which stems from the distinction between the beautiful and the useful, the latter being considered inferior. In the 19th century ‘ornament’ has a negative connotation, since associated with the superficial and even with bad taste, a stigma of the poor, the uneducated, all those left outside a system that accelerates its development in the wake of the industrial revolutions. Oddly enough, at the same time this underestimation has been associated to the feminine. As a consequence, neediework and crafts have been ciosely linked to each other by the 18th and 19th century criticism and literature of the academic art.