Is intellectual work better construed as exploration or performance?

Clearly both metaphors do work – I'm wondering which is better to cultivate on the margin.

My intuition is that it's better to lean on the image of intellectual work as exploration; curious what folks here think.

I'm a bit unclear on the question exactly. You ask which metaphor is better to cultivate on the margin, but I'm not sure for whom or for what purpose. Both metaphors seem clearly true to some extent to me, and which metaphor it fits more depends a lot on individuals and fields IMO.

From the examples you've given, you show a pretty heavy bias toward "intellectual work as exploration" providing us with things that are more true and useful, and I suppose I don't doubt you, in that it is "better" to take the approach more likely to give us something true and useful at the end (for which exploration, if not fully optimized, seems better-suited than performance).

That said, if I understand you correctly, it seems as though much exploration involves looking at the "performance" of others, and that performance exists only a as a layer on top of someone's prior exploration (however distant). Peter Singer sitting and reading and thinking for a long time is important, but Peter Singer giving a TED talk is also important, if we think of "intellectual work" as "have the idea, and make sure others also come to have the idea".