The Arts Department was established in 1986 to have unique, specialized library holdings of books from the fields of visual and applied arts, design, theatre, film, photography and music. These holdings also contain a reference collection of dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as magazines and periodicals from all areas of art. The literary library holdings contain 17,000 publications in Serbian and in other languages, which may be viewed in the Arts Department Reading-room.

Participating in the artistic life of Belgrade, the Arts Department organizes and conducts a range of cultural and arts programs:

• The Art Forum is a mass-media, multidisciplinary arts centre, in which new books, anthologies and other arts publications are presented, and lectures, lecture series and various discussions from the field of art are hosted.
  
  
• Independent and collective visual arts exhibitions of domestic and foreign artists, as well as literary and jubilee exhibitions. The main exhibition room is located at the Atrium gallery
  
  
• Music programs, concerts of classical, and traditional music, as well as jazz