I heard one of the Brit pack suggest that everything is art – or can be – and it made me think about Tolstoy’s essay What is Art? and the various attempts made to express what is poetry? including Shelley’s profound A Defence of Poetry, written in part because he was angry that Spencer had written an essay entitled An Apology of Poetry. But the question arises from the idea that if everything is art, then nothing is for how do you differentiate art at all? You cannot.
Few writers could ever make a typewriter or today, make their own computer but then few people who can, can also be writers. Many artists today take a short cut and buy the papers and paints instead of making them, and indeed buy all the tools they use instead of making them but once the craft of making your tools was part of your training. Craft. A word not used much by the Brit pack but which describes all of what they do. Because art is a life not just the work.
The artist would die rather than stop creating. That is what marks them out, that is what drives them, that is how you know who they are. Everyone else is a craftsman or woman. No work of art can ever be created by anyone less than an artist.