Andrew Barss wrote:

Does anything at all rest on this question?

Maybe mental / psychological barriers to get
over/under/around/beyond?
We often limit ourselves with self imposed or imposed by others
boundaries.

The realization that most "boundaries" aren't?

Take the "I can't carve or sculpt - but I CAN turn some interesting"
things.
Maybe if you sneak up to, and then slightly passed. the I Can Turn
But Not
Carve/Sculpt interface, whole no creative avenues may present
themselves.

That may make "turning" a somewhat unique woodworking gateway
to all sorts of other types of woodworking, and creative/artistic
expression, be it in wood or some other medium, or mix of mediums.

A lot of energy gets devoted to this sort of thing in the
craft/art/design world, and it seems to me the only useful
vrsion of it is if it's important to separate turning from sculpture,
like if you for some reason need to store one in a room separate
from another. Which doesn't happen very often. Classification
systems originate, usually, as ways of organizing things (books
in libraries, faculty at a university, footgear in a store).

Well it did make a whole hell of a lot of difference when I was
doing "craft shows" and "art shows". The "fine arts" shows
were better publicized, scheduled to coincide with a special
event and promoted much more than the "arts and crafts" shows
which often took place the previous weekend, acting as a means
to inform and attract people to the following weekend's Fine
Arts show.

And the promoter(s) of the Fine Arts shows often took a smaller
percentage of the sales than taken for the Arts & Crafts shows.
The shows were marketed to very different audiences - one having
beer, sodas and hot dogs and hamburgers, the other cheeses, wines
and french sounding bottled water(s).

I made jewelry and small sculpture - in silver and gold, the jewelry
using topaz, aquamarine, amathyst, emeralds and diamonds. In
an "arts & crafts" show, my works were at the high end of the
audiences's price range - or beyond their price range. In the
"fine arts" show, I was in the lower to mid price range. Sales
and subsequent commissioned work was significantly different
depending on how my work was categorized.

there is some objective, factual basis for classifiying natural
kinds of things into rigid categories (bananas are genetically different,
in defined ways, from slugs). But for all human-made things,
you run into the problem all the time that there jsut aren't rigid, crisp
boundaries between groups of things. Think about prosaic words,
like "furniture". Is a lamp a piece of furniture? Is an electric fan?
What about a shelf on a wall? There is no right answer to these
questions -- they just show how vague words are when you try to
press the point.

-- Andy Barss

This could get into Zen - everything is everything - each merely
a different manifestation of the One Thing

charlie b