[NLips]

Does your art class perhaps only cover “fine art”? Or does it also include the performing arts like music, theatre, even cinema? In my experience in the UK, “art” in school commonly only means fine art, and other forms of art are different enough that they’re broken out into other “subjects”.

[TheRealNGenius]

Yeah I think that's pretty fair. Music, theatre, cinema are performing arts. Not art. You qualify it with "performing".

And that's my point really. It's a distinction based on definition. Collectively, institutions recognize this and inherently add qualifiers to distinguish between these varying disciplines.

[NLips]

So am I right in understanding you aren’t saying photography isn’t “an art”; just that it isn’t “fine art”? In which case I think you’d see much less disagreement here.