There was an interesting conversation on Comparative Tarot recently, about what it means to be an artist. The question under discussion was whether artists can be divided into "true artists," who live and breathe art, and would go insane if they couldn't pursue their work, vs. dilettantes, who simply putter around.
Now, I feel pretty strongly opposed to this concept of a "true artist." It seems to me that by that definition few would qualify as an artist; I certainly would not. Nor would, I think, the majority of working professional artists.
But then this morning I was thinking about it some more, and I remembered a wonderful movie called Hunting Tigers. It's a short documentary by Steven Okazaki, in which he tries to make a film about the writer Kenzaburo Oe, but it falls through. So he asks his friends to connect him with four young Japanese artists, and interviews them instead.
One of the people he interviews is dancer Saburo Teshigawara. I'd never heard of Teshigawara before seeing this film, but he's apparently quite popular in Europe and Japan. Anyway, during his interview for Hunting Tigers, Teshigawara agreed to improvise a few minutes of dancing for the camera. Okazaki described how his cameraman turned to him afterwards, with tears in his eyes, and said, "This is a true artist."
The cameraman was right. I'm not that into dancing, but this was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It was like watching his soul sing. Haunting, lyrical; it was beyond description. I've been searching in vain for another film of his work ever since. Teshigawara is a genius. A true artist.
So I cannot say that there's no such thing as a "true artist," a more "pure" artist than the rest of us. They exist, but like "true genius," there are far fewer who deserve the title than those who claim it.
(If you're interested in seeing Hunting Tigers, the only way I know of is to buy the video from Steven Okazaki's web site. I have a copy, and if you're ever in the Durham NC area I'll be happy to show it for you. I suppose that if you live in a major city with some really, really good video rental stores, you might be able to track it down.)
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