It's All Art (except that)

The last couple of days, I've been spending a lot of time in the park with Danto's After The End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. It is an interesting read, and slightly less complicated than the title suggests. It has, however, brought my attention (back) to the idea that anything and everything could potentially be art.

There are many variations on this particular theme that keep spinning around in my pretty little head, and I won't get into them all now; it's 2.26 am and I should be asleep. What's keeping me up tonight is the definition of the term "art".

After reading a couple of chapters, I notice that all the examples used are either paintings or installations. Typical examples of modern art. Perhaps it isn't too strange for someone writing about art to use such typical examples. What interests me is the examples he doesn't use. It seems many of the disciplines of the arts are excluded. What about poetry, for example? Music? Drama, literature, architecture? In older texts, these are more or less given, yet I've realized that I, too, don't immediately associate music, or literature for that matter, with the term "Art".

There is of course the possibility that I am an exception, that I wasn't properly taught the nature of art when I was a child, or that I misunderstood what I was taught (I was never a particularly bright child). But maybe, just maybe, the stereotypes I have been considering to be art - painting, installation, obscure nonsensical items that resemble nothing at all and symbolize the decline of mankind, the evil of capitalism, the evil of communism, the moral corruption of society, or the artist's feelings about something, isn't exclusively my own misconceptions. And no, I don't know why I say that, OF COURSE it is all in my head.

Anyway. I just thought it was curious that, since art has developed in such a way that everything is allowed and anything could be art, disciplines that used to be a naturally included in the term "ART" are not anymore. They have become separate disciplines in their own right, with their own theories and histories, and though I don't think this specialization is necessarily a bad thing, it does make me wonder what's left of the arts as such, and what its place is in modern society.

I should mention that everything I just mentioned that used to be a part of the arts is now parts of what we know as "culture".
Including art.