Masterpieces vs Mediocrity — Salvador Dalí and You

Daily Meditation 1,077–2/16/2025

Y’know.

Salvador Dalí did over 1,500 paintings in his lifetime. Beyond that, he also did thousands of sculptures, drawings, and other pieces of art.

It’s estimated, in all, he had 8,000–9,000.

All this over a period of approximately 74 years.

If you do some basic math, that means Dalí was creating a piece of art about once every 3 days for all 74 YEARS. Of course, that’s an average and he had periods of less prolific creation and some of higher creation.

…And if you’ve ever worked with oil paint, you know it is an incredibly time consuming process. A true labor of love.

But what many don’t realize is that Dalí has “only” 14 masterworks. When you frame it that way, “only” 14 sounds sad — but 14 is pretty much unheard of in terms of art.

Only .16% of his art were Masterworks.

“Only” is a very heavy word, here, as anyone familiar with Dalí knows that some of these pieces are gigantic — the largest, “The Hallucinogenic Toreador” is 398 × 299 cm (or 13 feet by 10 feet, massive). Just imagine the hundreds, if not thousands of hours into just this one piece…
Then imagine that compared to the one piece…