benfridge • read

"In the book Art & Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland tell a parable about a ceramics teacher who split his students into two groups. "All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality." The teacher graded the quantity group by the pounds of pottery they produced, and the quality group by the one "perfect" pot they created. "The works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity," Bayles and Orland wrote. "It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes—the 'quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts."