The arts, or creative arts, are a vast range of human practices involving creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. The arts encompass diverse and plural modes of thought, deeds, and existence in an extensive range of media. Both a dynamic and characteristically constant feature of human life, the arts have developed into increasingly stylized and intricate forms. This is achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training, or theorizing within a particular tradition, generations, and even between civilizations. The arts are a medium through which humans cultivate distinct social, cultural, and individual identities while transmitting values, impressions, judgments, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life, and experiences across time and space.

The arts are divided into three main branches: visual arts, literature, and performing arts. Examples of visual arts include architecture, ceramic art, drawing, filmmaking, painting, photography, and sculpture. Examples of literature include fiction, drama, poetry, and prose. Examples of performing arts include dance, music, and theatre. The arts can employ skill and imagination to produce physical objects and performances, convey insights and experiences, and construct new natural environments and spaces.

The arts can refer to common, popular, or everyday practices as well as more sophisticated, systematic, or institutionalized ones. They can be discrete and self-contained or combine and interweave with other art forms, such as combining artwork with the written word in comics. Art forms can also develop or contribute to aspects of more complex art forms, as in cinematography. By definition, the arts themselves are open to being continually redefined. The practice of modern art, for example, is a testament to the shifting boundaries, improvisation and experimentation, reflexive nature, and self-criticism or questioning that art and its conditions of production, reception, and possibility can undergo.

As both a means of developing capacities of attention and sensitivity and ends in themselves (art for art's sake), the arts can be a form of response to the world. It is a way to transform human responses and what humans deem worthwhile goals or pursuits. From prehistoric cave paintings during the Upper Palaeolithic, to ancient and contemporary forms of rituals, to modern-day films, the arts have registered, embodied, and preserved the ever-shifting relationships of humans with each other and the world.

The arts are considered various practices or objects done by people with skill, creativity, and imagination across cultures and history. These activities include painting, sculpting, music, theatre, literature, and more. Art refers to the way of doing or applying human creative skills, typically, but not necessarily, in visual form.

However, there have been disputes on whether or not to classify something as a work of art, referred to as classificatory disputes about art. For example, classificatory disputes in the 20th century have included Cubist and Impressionist paintings, Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, the movies, J. S. G. Boggs' superlative imitations of banknotes, conceptual art, and video games.

In Ancient Greece, art and craft were referred to by the word techne. Ancient Greek art introduced veneration of the animal form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristically distinguishing features, such as Zeus' thunderbolt. In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominant church insisted on the expression of Christian themes due to the overlap of church and state in medieval Europe. Asian art has generally worked in style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour. A characteristic of this style is that local colour is defined by an outline, the cartoon being a contemporary equivalent. This is evident in the art of India, Tibet, and Japan. Islamic art avoids the representation of living beings, particularly humans and other animals, in religious contexts. It instead expresses religious ideas through calligraphy and geometrical designs.

In the Middle Ages, liberal arts were taught in European medieval universities as part of the trivium, an introductory curriculum involving grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and of the quadrivium, a curriculum involving the "mathematical arts" of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. In modern academia, the arts can be grouped with, or a subset of, the humanities.