PTP two quotes from john Camps blog today (my emphasis)
“Generally, if you’re not compelled to do a particular form of art, you won’t be all that good at it. And people who collect visual art work will see that; people who listen to music will hear it. Serious art collectors are like serious baseball fans—they might not be able to do it themselves, but they have keen eyes and ears for ability.”
“Two recent books, still in the stores, have a lot to say about the relative values of talent and work. One is called Outliers 
Both suggest that while inborn talent is of some utility, the thing that really determines success in the arts (or any other field) is simply doing it. Gladwell even suggests a standard: ten thousand hours. He suggests that if you work very hard a particular art form—art in the widest sense, including sports, music, law, medicine and so on—that you will begin to reach a mastery of it after 10,000 hours of hard work. That’s 40 hours a week (no cheating!) for five years, or 20 hours a week for ten.
Colvin argues that people need to do a certain kind of difficult practice—long and unremitting and constantly challenging—before they reach mastery. He uses Mozart as an example, Despite Mozart’s reputation as a child genius, he says that a real analysis of his work suggests that he might have been something of a late bloomer. As the son of a well-known composer who carefully directed his child’s work from the age of two, Mozart put in his 10,000 hours (to conflate Gladwell with Colvin) while still relatively young. His status as a child genius developed because he put in his ten thousand hours as a child.”
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/03/a-life-in-art.html
