“Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.” – Sue Grafton

Having been an avid history reader for many years I agree with this.

When I read this quote I think about my years teaching. I so often got that excuse from my students as sort of plea. They wanted me to use the difficulty of a project as a reason to grade them better than their work really deserved. “But I worked really hard on it” they would say. My response was always the same; “Hard work doesn’t matter if the end product isn’t any good”. They didn’t like that.

I would explain. That in art history people don’t say ‘oh, it was really hard to build that giant sculpture so Michelangelo can be excused for making the head all caddywumpus and ugly’. No, if the ‘David’ wasn’t great nobody would have cared how much work went into it, how hard it was. In the end, the piece has to be great, no matter if it was a lucky shot that took a second, or was planned for years. The art is what matters, not the ‘difficulty’.

Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com