Origin of "7th Art"

[The_Batman]

I’ve always heard of cinema being called the seventh art, but why? What are the other six arts? And why seven? There’s definately more than seven no matter how you cut it.

[Exapno_Mapcase]

http://www.news.cornell.edu/Chronicle/96/7.25.96/kammen.html

“During that time I [Michael Kammen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Cornell] became increasingly interested in the changing relationship between high culture and popular culture. Whenever I encountered material pertinent to that complex and important relationship, I ran across references to Gilbert Seldes. I began to follow Seldes’ writings closely and discovered that his 1924 book, The Seven Lively Arts, was the very first to insist that popular culture deserved serious attention from cultural critics.”

snip

But in The Seven Lively Arts, he presented a then-radical thesis: that vaudeville, musical revues, movies, jazz and comics should be taken as seriously as the ballet or the opera. Seldes became the nation’s most ardent “cultural democrat,” championing Charlie Chaplin, Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, the Ziegfeld Follies and George Herriman’s comic strip “Krazy Kat” in columns for emerging “middlebrow” publications like The Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Esquire.

I’ve never heard movies referred to explicitly as the 7th Art, but there is a movie history by Arthur Knight in 1957 called The Liveliest Art. Maybe that led into movies given highest honors.

Seldes increased the scope of his argument later in books like The Public Arts when he included television and radio as influencing popular culture.