The rocking horse was a toy invented in the nineteenth century. Like a painting of a horse, it was an attempt to represent the real animal. In fact, it tried to do more by incorporating a rocking movement designed to give the effects of riding on a galloping horse. While the painting of the horse was considered art, the equally if not more creative rocking horse was not. This reveals the distinction that for an object to be deemed as "art" depended on the intention of the object maker while making the object. The maker of the toy horse had intention for it to have a much stronger practical use as a toy, whereas the painter of the horse painting ( barring the rare commission ) was operating on a more abstract motive. That this motive existed was probably the result of a mental conditioning brought about by the development of a history of art in Western civilisation.

A lot of ideas has been advanced recently, from the viewpoint of art criticism, that there was a period dating from the Renaissance in the fifteenth century to around the end of Abstract Expressionism in the nineteen-sixties, during which there existed a history of art, meaning a sequence of linear progression of art developments supported by successive art doctrines. Amongst these ideas, the chief advocates of whom are Hans Belting and Arthur C. Danto, working independently, is this new twist that there is art before art history, art during art history and art after the end of art history. Or perhaps it should be restated as painting before art history, painting as art during art history, and painting as one of many mediums of art after the end of art history. All this has to do with the prevailing mindset while a painting was in the making. Before the time of the Renaissance, painters making pictures did not have the attitude that they were making art but were instead simply making devotional pictures. From the time of the Renaissance, painting and to a lesser extent sculpture were elevated to a new category of high art, and any other objects not made within the prevailing Western doctrine or narrative of the day laid outside the pale of history, and were not deemed as art but instead as craft or decoration. Thus African sculpture was not the high art that Picasso's Cubist paintings were, and Japanese print-making lesser art than the work of Van Gogh which it influenced.