Word-of-mouth response alone - now enhanced by internet posting - has placed it among the best-selling books on artmaking and creativity nationally.Īrt & Fear has attracted a remarkably diverse audience, ranging from beginning to accomplished artists in every medium, and including an exceptional concentration among students and teachers. First published in 1994, Art & Fear quickly became an underground classic. This is a book written by artists, for artists - it’s about what it feels like when artists sit down at their easel or keyboard, in their studio or performance space, trying to do the work they need to do. Their insights and observations, drawn from personal experience, provide an incisive view into the world of art as it is expeienced by artmakers themselves.
The book’s co-authors, David Bayles and Ted Orland, are themselves both working artists, grappling daily with the problems of making art in the real world. For all practical purposes making art can be examined in great detail without ever getting entangled in the very remote problems of genius.”Īrt & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn’t get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. Geniuses get made once-a-century or so, yet good art gets made all the time, so to equate the making of art with the workings of genius removes this intimately human activity to a strangely unreachable and unknowable place. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people essentially - statistically speaking - there aren’t any people like that. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. 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.“This is a book about making art. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A". 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. 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. The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. Image Continuum Press 1 edition (April 1, 2001) Untitled Document Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland
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