These are marked categories of art, never identified solely as art but rather art introduced by an adjective, e.g. poster, graphic, primitive, folk, naive, low. Though the defining features are often vague or misleading, such art is considered closer to social activity and distanced from aesthetic purity. It is often handled or consumed tactually. It may also have an instrumental function and may be mass produced thus denying the status of 'unique object'. While the work of auction houses and some dealers to put the imprimatur of art on anything 'collectable' has problematized 'aesthetic value', aestheticians have refigured the terrain by inviting such forms of art into the museum or into art books which highly promote the adjectival condition of their association with unmarked and thus pure art.
Posters are usually consider a low art, but there are some interesting reversals.
Toulouse-Lautrec own works, are certainly low art, if they can be even be accepted as such. Poster art represents the realm of the popular and many of these posters were popular in their own time. Nevertheless, recognition of them by the legitimating institutions of art was, and is still, most often in the form of critique. In their discourses, posters are illegitimate as art or degenerate, associated with moral turpitude and the reproduction of delegitimate forms of culture. In 19th century Paris these are represented by the morally loose, suffragette women represented in early bicycle posters or worse, the high kicking women of Toulouse-Lautrec's now famous poster for Jane Avril's licentious cabaret.