Chapter 1, The Nature of the Problem Summary and Analysis

Art-making is a struggle. The authors point out that much art is unfinished, inauthentic, repetitive, juvenile, and overdone. This will lead the artist to ask how art should be done, and why the artist sometimes fails. Art may be harder to create today, as individuals have more liberty to create and less institutional structure to inspire them. Art involves doubt, departing from others; there is no Church to dictate what is beautiful. Further, art-making is not based merely on talent, nor that talent is innate. Talent, luck, fate and tragedy all matter, but they do not aid in the day to day creation of art.

So the authors make a few assumptions on which the rest of the book will rely: (1) Art-making involves skills that can be learned; (2) Art is made...