(I don't think your cheese/ham sandwich thing is a very good example for you :) because they are both sandwiches - they do look the same and they're both for the same thing!! That sounds like an argument I should use)”

I should have used pies, pork pies v potatoe and onion pies, but I’ll stick with sandwiches.

Cheese and ham sandwiches are not the same thing at all (in fact a Muslim or vegetarian might get quite upset if you switched ‘em round and they got the wrong one :-) They may look the same and they might fill an empty space (as does a painting on a cave wall) but it’s what’s inside their creator's mind that matters.

The rustic tea bowl maker (usually a farmhand not a master craftsman) didn’t turn out a piece of high art, he threw a rough old bowl from gritty old clay to hold his low-grade tea – period. Got nothing at all to do with the refined tea ceremony where said bowl ends up elevated to something worth (in many cases) mega bucks (and incidentally has a place in many a national museum).

I’m not saying ‘we’ have art and ‘they’ don’t at all (or driving a wedge between cultures). If anything I’m saying we’re sticking our ‘art’ label onto something that originally wasn’t art at all and, in so doing, bringing it within our own (quite narrow actually) interpretations of creative expression – note the word ‘creative’ rather than ‘artistic’ :-)