About Art and Artistic Talent

The gift of artistic creativity as an enduring personal trait is dependent on at least two different factors. Firstly, there must be an urge, drive or motivation to create something new, and secondly, there must be talent to carry out and materialize this creative urge.

The many individuals who possess only one of these factors may be taken as proof that we are dealing with two different and, at times, unrelated abilities. There are many people who, though possessing an immense urge to create in the various fields of art, never succeed, because they lack the necessary talent. They may be found crowding the cafés and sidewalks of such places as Greenwich Village, Montmartre and elsewhere waiting desperately for the muse to remember them. Others, on the other hand, although considerably gifted and with a specific talent in some art, never desire or attempt to create something original of their own. There are the priests of art, who devote themselves to the performance, teaching, translation or study of art, but lack any ambition for any kind of innovation in the creative sphere.

In this paper I will only deal with the second of these abilities—the artistic talent—being fully aware that it is only one of the many complex factors underlying the phenomenon called creativity. Thus, even though we may understand its dynamics and origin, we will still be unable to solve the riddle of creativity.

Kris (1952), who may be regarded as the founder of the modern psychoanalytic theory of art, approached art from the viewpoint of communication. To quote the introduction of his study: 'Our starting point will be the function of art as a specific kind of communication from the one to the many' (p. 31).

Following this view, we may define any artistic talent as a special ability to use such 'specific kinds of communication'. For the sender, i.e. the creator of art, this means the ability to express himself via a specific medium of a given art. For the receiver, however, it means