I think the people who say, "all creation is art" are the people with no real talent. it's the people who want to be as important and as famous as Michelangelo, but can't really get past painting a very iffy likeness of their cat in watercolors, and then hide it because they're afraid other people won't think it's any good. If people can claim anything to be art, then art loses all integrity. The difference, then, I think, is the difference between "art" and "crafts."
Art, pure art, is whatever you, personally, make of something. It can be anything, but if you like it, then it's good. If you don't like it, then it's bad. See, art is not communicable. it might be true that more than one person gets the same positive thing out of something, but that's just coincidence. If a small child paints a picture, the mother, father, grandparents, aunts and uncles all might think its genius, but no one else. Does that make it any less special? No, because art elicits response, it is not subject to it. Art is itself, regardless of what people think of it. There exists the art (much like Plato's forms, I guess, which I really don't like to fall back on, but there you go), and there also exists each person's subjective interpretations of how they perceive the art, housed within themselves. What they think does not retroactively validate or invalidate the art, nor does it have any real control on what others think, unless the others allow it to (the artist, though, would never allow others to influence what he thinks of his art). So this is what I think art is. And in this sense, anything can be art, but only to anyone. Someone's art is someone else's junk, and there you go.
On the other hand, though, you've got craft. This, to me, is anything you do to make money to live- anything. If you're a roofer, your craft is roofing. If you're a product marketing specialist for a signal conditioning company, then your craft is marketing. If you paint and sell your paintings to museums or private collectors, then your craft is painting. No matter how good at whatever you do you are, if you willfully offer it up to public evaluation and for use other than your own, or if it was created not for the joy of creation but to serve a purpose, then it is a craft. Once it leaves the realm of the personal, it is no longer art. This doesn't make craft any less valuable than art, but it does make it different.
Art's only aim is to elicit altruistic intangibles. I paint because it's fun, and give them to others, when asked, because they like them, or remind them of me. I've also heard of a painter who spent like two years locked in his apartment painting, and finished thousands of pictures. When he was done, though, he burned them all, and no one understood why. I think it's because he wanted to keep them art, and not subject them to the judgment of others. Plus, once society gets a hold of something like that, everyone just has to know everything about it, and it shows up on television and all sorts of crap like that.
But anyway, I keep thinking of a quote from the band Too Much Joy - "if art is anything that someone pays you for/then I have met Picasso, mistook him for a whore." I don't know if this really applies, but maybe. I mean, Picasso wasn't a great painter because so many people liked his work. He was a great painter because he was a great painter, and what other people think is totally irrelevant. So, all this buying and selling of his pictures for millions of dollars that goes on made him into a whore- either because they are just buying and selling something he was good at, like a prostitute to sex, or because he allowed himself to become subjugated to their whims, and so he created to sell, and not out of pure creativity.
