Artists are capable of making only so many notable works.

Picasso’s prolific ouvre comprises a very long beigeness studded with occasional brilliant moments. Nearly all of his work after 1951 is forgettable chaff.

Pollock was far less prolific and lived a much shorter life, but far fewer of his works, even viewed as a percentage, are unmemorable.

Duchamp famously stopped making art at a certain mid-life moment, yet lived a long life. I can recall no chaff in Duchamp’s ouvre.

O’Keeffe seems to have very carefully pearled out her efforts, and perhaps even self-edited, to the point that I can recall no fodder in her prolific body of work at all.

Agnes Martin’s long body of work is unmemorable, and often unseeable. It’s only remarkable in the sense that any artist could be satisfied with such barely visible tedium during a lifetime of creation.

We are enjoined as artists to take a workmanly approach to our studios, to produce constantly, to resist unproduction. The result is landfill-loads of beige studio chaff with which far too many of us feel we must burden the public eye.

The bad joke of art has already been played upon us, its most willing victims.

For us to then inflict vast image libraries of forgettable inventory onto a world already overloaded to the point of incomprehension, so dulled with endless relentless textures of sensory experience that seeing, hearing, feeling at any level has become swimming against a brutal tide — it’s simply passing anger and damage on to humanity, compounding the harm.

What we ought to be doing is slowing production down. Being much more demanding of ourselves. Restricting the quantity of released art. And, sometimes, not making art at all.

Thinking in terms of remarkable experiences. Memorable experiences. Transformative experiences.

Visual art is among the least regarded of all the humanities. We only harm ourselves as artists, and the world that, we believe, needs good art, when we geyser massive floods of undistinguished output into the public eye.

We can hold back. We can stridently self edit. We can do better.