Art and Fear
by David Bayles and Ted Orland
Mentioned once across 1 show · first heard Feb 2026 on My First Million.
The general take
Shaan Puri highlights a quote from Art and Fear that resonated with him, specifically about how most of your work is meant to be practice that teaches you to eventually make great art. He presented this idea positively, as if it was an insightful framework worth sharing.
About
"This is a book about making art. Ordinary art. Ordinary art means something like: all art not made by Mozart. After all, art is rarely made by Mozart-like people; essentially—statistically speaking—there aren't any people like that. 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. For all practical purposes making art can be examined in great detail without ever getting entangled in the very remote problems of genius." —-from the Introduction Art & 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.
Who said what
Shaan Puri👍 Recommends
…citing a book that influenced christina cacioppo's approach to creative work and project quantity
“And she had this quote on the top of her website, of her personal site that just, it was from the book, Art and Fear. And the quote was this, it says, the function of the overwhelming majority of work is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your art that soars.”
My First Million — ‘Think and Grow Rich’ Is a Lie. (But The Advice Still Works)at 39:20
Listener reviews
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