Response to Sarah

This is in response to Sarah’s question, “is becoming an artist an acquired talent?”
In regard to technical ability, the answer is an obvious yes. Becoming skillful at shading, coloring, etc., requires practice and thus is an acquired talent. However, whether or not these skills constitute artistic ability is questionable.
For this reason I suspect that a formalist, such as Clive Bell, could argue that artistic ability is an innate ability. Bell considers technical ability as unnecessary and seems to consider the appreciation of significant form as an inborn ability. However, the viewpoint of Freud states that artistic ability arises overcoming our shame for our repressed desires, and so by learning to overcome our shame we can acquire artistic ability.
To take another approach to this question I will focus on the artistic ability of autistic children, some of whom (savants) seem to be born with an innate artistic ability. One theory of why this happens lies in a possible explanation of autism. Some people have hypothesized that autistic persons are born with an inability to mesh all the information of the sensory world into one single concept. For example, when non-autistic people look at a sphere they see the circular shape and the shading of the light When they put this information together they become aware that they are looking at the sphere—at first glance they are unaware of the shape or the shading as separate qualities, and are only aware of the two combined. An autistic person, however, would not be able to combine the two qualities and would be aware of both the shape and the shading independently of each other; this gives them a unique ability to artistically express both qualities in their purest form. In this sense, artistic ability could be innate. However, this knowledge gives us an ability to try and overcome the natural conceptualization of our senses as some artists have apparently done. In this way artistic ability can be acquired. (Fox, D. (2009) The inner savant. Discover Presents the Brain, pp.10-15.)

QUESTION: Is there a relationship between Plato’s forms and formalism?