the artistic sprint, and the 48 hour magazine

There’s a lot of value in the artistic sprint — “quick! write a novel in a month!” … “14 songs in 28 days!” … “24 hours for a full comic book!“

The artist gets to explore, quickly, many ideas. He practices starting. He can fail with some impunity. (“I had to do it fast, so it’s not as graceful as I’d like…”) He can succeed, and bring the work along, perhaps at a later date.

It tightens up the palette, makes the artist consider what’s truly important to him, both in terms of production and theme, and brings forth that constant in a creative person’s life: “what now?” And, just like always, but a little bigger in the heat of the sprint, the clock is ticking.

It’s even better with a group! — Sprint, support, share.

And then there’s this story about the value of quantity over quality, from David Bayles and Ted Orland’s Art and Fear:

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.

Sprint! It’s fun.

I bring all of this up because the latest, most visible creative sprint — a magazine produced in 48 hours — is out now. The magazine (“48 Hour Magazine”) was photographed, illustrated, and edited in two days, from 1500 submissions from around the world. The first issue is appropriately themed “Hustle.” There’s a preview at that link.