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Can an Artist Be Too Productive?


Pong Messiah
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An artist can only be too productive if it conflicts with some other goal such as a publisher wanting to keep the releases at a steady pace so as to keep the public consumption at a level healthy for continued sales. An artist of any kind can never produce too much, with no other criteria, in my opinion.

 

 

"Can an artist be too productive?" sounds like "can a person earn too much money?" Authors and musicians get paid for their work. More is better for them, isn't it? Why should they care if the consumers find the material repetitive?

 

What if the focus on production keeps them from producing higher quality work, which would help them earn more money? For example, an author who sells 5,000 copies of each book, and manages to write 5 books a year. That's 25,000 books, which is pretty good. But maybe if they really buckled down and worked on 1 higher quality book where they sell 4 times their normal amount and 2 normal quality books which also get a 10% boost because of people liking the other book. Now they've sold 20,000 + 11,000, or 31,000 books, their publisher is much happier, their paycheck is bigger and they've increased the likelihood of selling more books in the future.

 

In that case, the focus on production has hurt their bottom line.

Totally true. It would make economic sense for artists to focus their efforts on work destined to be best-sellers and masterpieces, and scrapping the works people are going to think are worthless. But how does one actually do that? Creativity isn't logical, especially when that creativity is relied upon to feed your family. That's why creativity is hard.
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