Lester Vanwinkle taught sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University for three decades. Here is a set of rules that he collected and disseminated to his students and collegues over that time.

I got this list from Mary Eisendrath who also sent these collected quotes.

1. Do not arrive on time for this class. Be early and appear busy. Punctuality and thrift precede cleanliness in the eyes of “You Know Who”.
2. Have ideas in your work. Mere personal expression in unavoidable, highly over-rated, and can be slovenly self-indulgent.
3. If you have no ideas check your pulse.
4. If you have and idea (one) you are in trouble. Try the “What-If-Twenty-Five” game.
5. If you steal ideas cover your tracks. Be the master thief and do the perfect crime. Or, don’t. Be postmodern, deconstructivist, conceptualist, or appropriationist. Plagiarism is in fashion; fashion is vicious and violent.
6. Remember that in our game, an idea is no better than its articulation.
7. Speak up in critiques. Ye shall be known by your words.
8. Do not say, “like.” For obvious reasons...like you’re talking mostly about yourself...or whatever.
9. If you believe that criticism is only personal opinion, quit school now. Save money. Personal opinions are absolutely free and in infinite supply on the street.
10. Beware of art jargon. No one knows what words like balance and rhythm mean.
11. Believe me, there is nothing negative about space. The constructivists considered space a tangible material.
12. Never let your story be more interesting than your art.
13. Never explain your choices by what you did not want; what you did not want or intend is an infinite set.
14. Do not let American industry make your color, surface, image, proportional, or scale choices in your work.
15. High-tech, avant-guarde, or expensive traditional materials will not improve bad ideas.
16. Simple repetition never doesn’t work. Repetition, like contrast, is a visual phenomenon not a conceptual issue.
17. Do not make things the same size without good reason. (Modern Revision) No, do not make things the same size.
18. Do not use obvious proportion ratios. 1:1, 2:1, 2:4, etc.
19. Do not center or divide things in the middle. The middle. The middle is such a swell place; it should always be reserved for special occasions.
20. Avoid bilateral symmetry and 90 degree angles. (See special occasions.)
21. Do not arrange things to lead your eye in a circle, square, rectangle, triangle, cube, cone, etc.
22. Do not use old solutions for new problem; e.g., good composition is non-exportable. Composition is good because it is interwoven into the fabric of an idea. (without the warp the woof is just a doggy sound.)
23. If you want to use black, white, or gray see me first.
24. Always make primary colors secondary choices.
25. Give color significant jobs to do in your work.
26. Paint all carvings, especially stone carvings.
27. Find significant terminations for three-dimensional lines.
28. Remove source references from found objects.
29. Always radically modify or rectify found objects.
30. Trust your instincts. Trust your intuition. Your best tools...
31. Make weird things. It is an artist’s job to do so.
32. Remember that all things in the same context relate. Any further similarities, connections, parallels, vectors, or threads only compound an already existing relationship.
33. The only thing worse than a bad piece of sculpture is a big, bad piece of sculpture. Even worse is a big, bad, red piece of sculpture.