September Shorts: Quantity Over Quality

Why September Shorts? Why thirty blog posts in thirty days? Sounds (a) crazy and (b) pointless, right? Maybe.

By way of some sort of answer, a post about pots. I love this anecdote from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s excellent Art and Fear.

There's a ceramics teacher at an art school. (The story is probably apocryphal: short, powerful, truthful, much like a fable.) The teacher splits the ceramics students into two groups. On the left-hand side of the studio the students are encouraged to produce as much work as possible. Pot after pot – quantity is the aim. The work would simply be weighed at the end of the production period and grades assigned based on the amount of work produced. On the right-hand side of the class quality was the aim: ‘Those being graded on “quality” … needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.’

When grading the work, the teacher adjusted tack and decided to mark everything based on quality. A ‘curious fact emerged’, write Bayles and Orland, ‘the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity’. The authors conclude: ‘If you think good work is somehow synonymous with perfect work, you are headed for big trouble.’

So there you go. Thirty pots in thirty days. No typo.
​​