 Dewey’s critique of a position that he calls “the museum conception of art” is one of the most famous parts of his aesthetic theory. It is for him a textbook example of the kind of compartmentalizing attitude toward art which his naturalism seeks to overcome. In Dewey’s rendering, the museum conception of art by and large corresponds to the modern idea of fine art which emerged in the eighteenth century and which received its most theoretically developed account in Charles Batteux’s The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle (Les Beaux Arts réduits á un même principe, 1746). Around this time, the different arts were gradually seen to form a unified group separate from the sciences, religion, and most importantly from the practical arts. The idea of the autonomy of art surfaced. Art was considered a self-regulating field for which the different art institutions, which were emerging simultaneously, provided a setting. As opposed to the practical arts, such as embroidery and shoe making, whose value depended on the external goals they served, the fine arts were considered to have their own intrinsic measures of value, which could, moreover, be realized in full only within the spaces of the developing art institutions.