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.
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.
I highly recommend checking out his work.
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.
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.