Today, as opposed to in the past (where Fine Art= Academic Painting and Sculpture basically), the term Fine Arts could involve just about anything artistic, wheras the term Plastic Arts deals more specifically with painting, sculpture etc, which is really what the term Artes Plasticas refers to, at least in Brazilian Portuguese.

mais uma sugestão :)

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Note added at 27 mins (2006-08-30 20:08:58 GMT)
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Visual arts
The visual arts are a class of art forms, including painting, sculpture, film, photography, and others, that focus on the creation of works which are primarily visual in nature.
Arts or the Arts encompasses visual arts, performing arts, language arts, and culinary arts. Many artistic disciplines involve aspects of the visual arts as well other types, so these definitions are not strict.

The current usage of visual arts includes fine arts and well as crafts, but this was not always the case. In Britain and elsewhere, a visual artist referred to a person working in the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or printmaking) and not the handicraft,craft, or applied art disciplines. This distinction was emphasized by artists of the Arts and Crafts movement who valued vernacular artforms as much as high forms. The movement contrasted with modernists who sought to withhold the high arts from the masses by keeping them esoteric. Art schools made a distinction between the fine arts and the crafts in such a way that a craftsperson could not be considered a practitioner of art.

wikipedia.com

A “arte” passou a ser um leque muito abrangente de produções específicas relacionadas não mais ao sentimento da visão, mas sobretudo, as expressões internas de significado e aos arcabouços das técnicas de execução.