Ming the Mechanic:
Quantity and Quality

The NewsLog of Flemming Funch
 Quantity and Quality2004-01-23 08:11
1 comment
picture by Flemming Funch

From Chris Corrigan:
From Kevin Kelly's blog, comes a review of the book Art and Fear which includes this point:

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality," however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. 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 than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

Blogging vs. writing books, among many other lessons.
Hm, interesting. And business and life in general, I guess. Doesn't pay off very well to be a perfectionist if one holds out for the perfect outcome. But if one puts out a lot of stuff without being too attached to the details AND one has some kind of sense of where it ought to be going, one might actually get somewhere.


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1 comment

23 Jan 2004 @ 09:44 by martha : well I agree and disagree
with the article...yes practice makes perfect...and yet there are times when production can slow as new ideas are worked through. The best is a middle road where there is a steady flow of work but with space to allow for new forms to appear. I don't believe it is as simple as the above article implies. And quite frankly in art, the detail is everything...just don't get bogged down in them...everything is perfect.  


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