A Brief History of Art vs. Craft

I stumbled upon this fantastic video that talks about the history of when art and craft became two different things.  Definitely worth a few minutes of your time:

Here's a bit of the content from the video:

It might seem obvious to us today to view people, such as da Vinci or Michelangelo, as legendary artists, and, of course, they possessed extraordinary talents, but they also happened to live in the right place at the right time, because shortly before their lifetimes the concept of artists hardly existed....It wasn't until around 1400 that people began to draw a line between art and craft. In Florence, Italy, a new cultural ideal that would later be called Renaissance Humanism was beginning to take form. Florentine intellectuals began to spread the idea of reformulating classical Greek and Roman works, while placing greater value on individual creativity than collective production. A few brave painters, who for many centuries, had been paid by the square foot, successfully petitioned their patrons to pay them on the basis of merit instead. Within a single generation, people's attitudes about objects and their makers would shift dramatically, such that in 1550, Giorgio Vasari, not incidentally a friend of Michelangelo, published an influential book called, "Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects," elevating these types of creators to rock star status by sharing juicy biographical details. In the mind of the public, painting, sculpture and architecture were now considered art, and their makers creative masterminds: artists. Meanwhile, those who maintained guild traditions and faithfully produced candlesticks, ceramic vessels, gold jewelry or wrought iron gates, would be known communally as artisans, and their works considered minor or decorative arts, connoting an inferior status and solidifying the distinction between art and craft that still persists in the Western world....So maybe it's time to dispense with vague terms like art and craft in favor of a word like visual arts that encompasses a wider array of aesthetic production. After all, if our appreciation of objects and their makers is so conditioned by our culture and history, then art and its definition are truly in the eye of the beholder.  

So what do you think?  Should we just call it all visual arts?  Or do you think it's important to maintain the distinction between art and craft?

Thanks for stopping by!