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> Quantity over quality?

Isn't focusing on quantity the only reliable way to improve quality? See also, the usual Ira Glass quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/309485-nobody-tells-this-to....



Becoming a great artist usually means creating art every day. It depends on how you go about creating art though. You need focused studies. You need to push your boundaries. There's a shockingly low amount of technical improvement in this artist's work compared to other long-term online portfolios I've seen.


Focusing on quality is the only reliable way to improve quality. The use of quantity, in the "10,000 hours" or "2000 words a day, every day" style of formulation, is to provide ample opportunity for practice and improvement, but quantity alone never can suffice. With no focus on quality, all it gets you is the same work over and over.


If you throw a ball at a target 10,000 times you will get more accurate even if you don’t do any deliberate thinking about your mechanics.


Not everything is as easy as throwing a ball.


There's a writer who did a lot of short stories and I had read a couple of them decades ago and thought they were some of the best of all time. Also, they won awards and stuff. I really placed them on a pedestal.

But more recently, I found that a multivolume collection of all the short stories is available, and I started reading them. It was really disillusioning because it wasn't just that the average quality was a lot lower than the famous ones, the cringeworthiness started to extend to my image of the author.

It's possible that over time the later work ended up being uniformly brilliant, but I didn't finish.


Sure, but the point of the practice is to produce quality, and then display the good bits of your production because mixing the few good ones into the deludge of average works isn't very helpful for the audience.


It's just a fact that people sometimes are interested in artists as well as or more than the art they make. The not-so-great art may not be of interest to you, or some particular artist may not want to release it, but it seems to me that probably some people want something more comprehensive for similar reasons that they may read biographies.

I'm indifferent to Michelangelo's art, but I have read The Agony and the Ecstasy. In this particular case, a less filtered view of his art doesn't disillusion me because I'm not especially crazy about any of it. But he was famous, influential, and technically capable, so as a person was of interest to me.


Like no artists have released behind the scenes work or b-sides.


Not as their main work no, the very concept of b-side implies there is an a-side that has been more carefully curated.




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