Fantastic art is an art genre. The parameters of fantastic art have been fairly rigorously defined in the scholarship on the subject ever since the 19th century.^{[citation needed]} There was a movement of science fiction and fantasy artists prior to and during the Great Depression, which were mainly cover art and comic book illustrators.^{[citation needed]} One anthology about them is Infinite Worlds: The Fantastic Visions of Science Fiction Art by Vincent Di Fate] (himself a prolific SF and space artist), with foreword by Ray Bradbury.

Fantastic art has traditionally been largely confined to painting and illustration, but since the 1970s has increasingly been found also in photography. Fantastic art explores fantasy, "space fantasy" (a sub-genre which incorporates subjects of alien mythology and/or alien religion), imagination, the dream state, the grotesque, visions and the uncanny, as well as so-called "Goth" art. Being an inherent genre of Victorian Symbolism, modern fantastic art often shares its choice of themes such as mythology, occultism and mysticism, or lore and folklore, and generally seeks to depict the inner life (nature of soul and spirit).^{[citation needed]}