Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Stumbled on the documentary "David Lynch: The Art Life" before YouTube took it down.

That and "Crumb" are a couple of films that convinced me that some people just are artists. It's not ego, or some desire to be eccentric ... they can't help it. They live "the art life", damn the consequences.

You could handily list any number of other people (John Waters just came to mind).

Similar to the author of the blog post, I have sort of demurred when asked if I was an artist. Partly it sounds arrogant to say, "Why, yes I am."

Partly it seemed to be a thing in the eye of the beholder. "I don't know, do you think I am an artist?" Plenty of people don't think Andy Warhol was an artist, Jackson Pollock....

Sometimes I have treated "artist" as a profession. Do I get paid for my art? Why no, I do not. I get paid for programming. Although when I write a game I am both programmer and "game artist". (Or is perhaps designing an elegant API for a framework a kind of art form? Okay, maybe not.)

If an artist can be a hobbyist the way many of us are amateur musicians, woodworkers, cooks, mechanics, (construction contractors), in our spare time then, yes, many of us are artists.

I think the older I get though (and maybe the more films I see about artists) I am slowly coming to accept that, sure, I'm an artist too. Just maybe not a very good one.

If you enjoyed, or at least "got" something out of the Lynch, you might also the film documentary 'Jodorowsky's Dune'. Is a man with a fantastic vision he is unable to instantiate, an artist? Asking for a friend.

An artist, per Steven Pressfield, the author of "The War of Art", is someone who makes art. A painter paints, a writer writes, a musician makes music. So, if a person with a fantastic vision is putting out actual effort towards instantiating that vision, that person is an artist. On the other hand, if the fantastic vision remains purely a dream or a wish, they are not.

By the way, "The War of Art", and its sequel, "Turning Pro" are fantastic books on this topic. These books would be my number one recommendation to anyohe who aspires to be an artist.

Pressfield, no stranger to this tension would describe the sort of tension around identity as a form of Resistance. I just want to mention that he wrote another very motivating sequel to “The War of Art” last year entitled “Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be”. It takes a more practical approach to becoming and _being_ an artist.

> Is a man with a fantastic vision he is unable to instantiate, an artist?

I haven't seen the film but this is the defining part of the "artist" title for me. It's not that he wasn't able to instantiate his vision, but he made an attempt and that attempt had an impact on others. That is the art, and it's all performance. The instantiation doesn't matter so much as a message with receivers. If the receivers of whatever happened with his Dune weren't there, then I guess I would still call it something like a "lost" art. Still art, but unrecognized as such. And I'm not sure that would have mattered to the artist anyway.

Jodorowsky wasn’t able to realize Dune but has a number of films and a time of comics - many in collaboration with the legendary Mobius.

I highly recommend checking out his work.

Thanks, I have read and deeply enjoyed The Incal, as well as some of his films. I merely sought to use the specific example to pose a hypothetical.

Jodorowsky has other films lol

And books and graphic novels… The one failed Hollywood project is a blip in his career, not its center.

Trees for the Forest

> If an artist can be a hobbyist the way many of us are amateur musicians…

There are so many definitional and semantic struggles around who gets to call themselves “artist” or “hobbyist”. Among the most fraught involves money, as if you don’t get to call yourself an artist unless you derive your primary income from what would otherwise be called art. I’m more interested in your commitment to create, to inspire, and to present something deeply individual in what you create.

Making money with art usually means abandoning the creative process and becoming a manufacturing operation.

"The Art Life" is still available freely for me on YouTube. Perhaps it's a regional thing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLuVtXlwQVU

that's a shame "the art life" was taken down, it was a really interesting film.

When I searched for it just now, it appeared on Amazon Prime Video.

https://www.amazon.com/David-Lynch-Art-Life/dp/B071P6ZYVB/re...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com