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But you can't deny that one person can draw a straighter line than another with no practice. When you're talking about someone like Charlie Parker, who completely renovated jazz in a way I can't even fucking comprehend, yes, it becomes hard to determine what his "talent" was, but--and perhaps your word "technique" is a better one--what I mean by talent is the quantifiable. I completely agree that there is far to much emphasis on ideas/creativity--so in that sense I sympathize with yours and This Is Not Here's complaint that some people can become "artists" without working at it. However, there are cultural concepts--such as writing in iambic pentameter, or blending colors accurately--that are naturally grasped at different levels of ability. It doesn't mean that blending colors is an absolute "good talent," but it is within the context of our culture, and therefore becomes "natural talent." Perhaps someone has a natural talent at mixing colors in a way we don't aesthetically appreciate, so that might be considered "bad talent," within our culture that talent might be called "being good at mixing colors poorly." But it's natural.
Creativity is also somewhat quantifiable in that you can hold up the output of an artist in light of everything that the artist has been exposed to, and determine how much empiric restructuring has occurred. Or something. But creativity is essentially a measure of how much "new" stuff the artist comes up with that is also pleasing or valuable.
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