Art & Fear from David Bales and Ted Orland, subtitled “Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of ARTMAKING”, was the subject of a recent blog post from Austin Kleon, titled “Quantity leads to Quality (the origin of a parable)”. (search for it, it was published on December 10, 2020) Austin Kleon was amazed by a parallel in James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. In one book it was a ceramist in the other a photography teacher. Both instructors divined the class into two groups. In one they would be graded solely on quality. The other half of the students would be graded on the quality of their output. You can make a bunch of bad pottery and you could still get an A in the class. In the photography class if you came up with 100 prints you would get an A. Output less and your grade would suffer. The other group could do one piece or a few, but they had to be good, very good. At the end of the semester the best work came from the group that did a lot of it. Sounds unbelievable? Yet, it happened. I wrote to Ted Orland asking about the story. He confirmed that it actually happened in a Beginning Photography class taught at the University of Florida by Jerry Uelsmann. (look him up, great work) So the story is true. For quality work to emerge do a huge quantity. I will tell you, this inspired me to get going with One Typed Page. It is a start. Now I just need to work on the quantity. I am still trying to find out what the quantity was in photography.
— MichaelRpdx :: ih3k
PS The San Francisco Art Institute that I attended (1980 to 1983) had a similar take on work. If you did a bunch you go a Pass with Honors. Do some work you got a Pass,. I don’t recall anyone getting failed if the did something, anything.