Artists Should Be Allowed to Fail | Hacker News Reader

Artists Should Be Allowed to Fail

artsy.net

77 pointswallflower70 comments

Individuals and institutions do fund artists already, e.g. grants, patreon, commissions, donations, a plethora of residence programs - I'm all for having as much of all this as possible, and there is certainly not as much of it as there could be.

However, I think all of these have some element of the artists needing to have proven themselves or having a good portfolio - and I think that is more than fair and true of all professions.

Nobody who values their time and money wants to hire an untrained, inexperienced contractor who is about to do their first job. They are free to go to school, they may choose to get loans, it may turn out they suck at plumbing and then they are back at square one. None of that is society's fault.

For every successful artist there are thousands upon thousands of people whose art is unmarketable or unvalued by the market, and you simply cannot bend the market to your say-so. That's not how any of this works.

I agree overall that this article seems a bit incoherent.

I also actually agree that, other than in times of the rich patrons, there's actually more ways to get funded as an artist now than 10 years ago.

I'm not sure that marketability has ever been a good metric for deciding whether art is useful or not though. Useful art shows something about 'us' to the rest of 'us', and that may not be marketable at all.

In that case, what would really help is a basic income. If you are passionate about art, you can pursue meaningful art that might show us some things about the human condition without needing to worry about whether it is marketable.

If it becomes marketable so be it, there's your step up. If not, you are free to at least survive while trying to do whatever you are doing.

I'd argue that the way art is funded is highly tilted towards what grantmakers think is "good art", which often isn't, but is the idea that the people that give them money to fund art has....

> None of that is society's fault.

if a society can only produce debt-ridden failures, that society has failed. if society does not provide adequate resources and training, you end up with angry stupid people. there's not really a reason why people need to get into debt to be able to be useful members of society. that's how things are done in the united states, but its a pretty ineffective system in a lot of ways.

To continue along this line of reasoning, a successful society should allow for people to try their hand at a few different things without catastrophic consequences.

It stands to reason that people who are allowed to fail as well as recover are more likely to find a niche that allows them to thrive.

I agree with this. As an engineer I can say engineers very much have this. Free cloud computing credits, dirt cheap hardware to experiment on, plenty of free learning resources, and zero travel expenses for most projects.

Artists (and to a great degree, fundamental scientists in traditional academic tenure paths) don't.

Time is the primary limitation on learning art, engineering, or even science not other resources. Kids have a lot of time growing up with few limits, especially with long summers, but it’s still finite. Adults just have more obvious opportunity costs.

Kids are also competing with other kids for recognition and positive feedback, where adults are judged more harshly.

Is this evidence-based? I have believed this for a long time but it's from first principles (being able to experiment safely leads to more experiments) but I've noticed that European society is more conservative and prefers not to experiment despite having better welfare systems.

I wonder now whether proportionality is key. Whether the people who will experiment are precisely those who would prefer to make a metric ton for themselves by experimenting and aren't worried about the downside.

FWIW I have lived in Europe, America, and Asia. I like to think I'm fairly neutral.

It a bit depends also on "experiment in what?" and what are other cultural values that interact with it.

VC startup/entrepreneur culture does not punish failure all that much and people experiment a lot of time. There are people who get money after failure and after another failure and again. If you fail, then unless you went into dept you can find job somewhere.

The social system is only one factor in play.

I'm not overly familiar but as I understand it that welfare system goes deeper than just providing a financial safety net. To ensure workers aren't unfairly fired it's harder to fire workers. Workers also have a harder time leaving a job (long notice periods). All that makes experimentation more difficult.

It did for me.

Chef Forklift driver Freelance programmer Admin for a print design studio English teacher

That last one has me in a very good and happy job that pays well (I teach esl kids to cook and program, so everything kind of works out).

Being an artist is nothing like being a contractor, and markets are the worst possible way to determine artistic value.

Being an artist can involve doing things that hardly anyone likes, or no one at all likes, or no one at all likes for a few decades, or no one likes for most of the artist's working life - but then everyone likes. Or which everyone likes while the artist is still alive, and then no one likes.

There's no objective test of a "good portfolio". Drawing skills are easy to assess, but art is about vision and breadth of imagination, not about mechanical mimicry. That kind of talent is much harder to spot, especially at 18.

Also, those pieces of art that an artist considers a failure may become worth millions after the artist has been recognized.

Historically the artistic value of a painting isn't realised until well after the artist is dead. Kind of makes it hard to recommend art as a career.

Is that actually true though? My understanding is that most of the works of the Renaissance Masters were commissions so presumably someone valued them.

It seems to me that the problem is that at some point the idea developed that making art that is meaningful to the masses is beneath an "artist" and that is the point at which "artist" ceased to be a viable career path.

Well, making art has always been about making something impressive. It used to be that making stuff that was impressive and meaningful to the masses was relatively easy; whereas nowadays much of the worth of an artistic endeavor is not so easy to appreciate. (Can "the masses" appreciate a 4k demoscene intro? As in, understand what exactly makes it worthwhile?) It may be that such art is inherently harder to fund/support more generally, and even to assess (which leads to people falling back on their social networks - if you're a well-known demoscene coder, I'm more likely to think that your 4k intro may indeed demonstrate something novel and worthwhile - even and especially if I'm not a demoscene expert!)

> and markets are the worst possible way to determine artistic value

...except all the other ways that have been tried from time to time.

Check out the movie "F for Fake". It's a fake documentary that makes a point about art fakes and the experts who encourage judging work based on who made it.

What are some other ways that have been tried, and how have they failed?

> markets are the worst possible way to determine artistic value

Markets are the worst way to determine any value; if I ran the world all the prices of everything would be set differently. Nevertheless we haven't yet found a better way of estimating the value of things.

But on a relevant note; not only do markets give the impression that they don't value art closely to some sort of objective intrinsic value - they also probably can't incentivise great works either. Consider the case of Don Quixote [0]. We have arguably one of the greatest novels of any language, ever. It was "engendered" in a prison [1] and the value of that work to the literary canon goes way beyond whatever trials befell Cervantes in getting the life experiences to write it. The situation defies any sort of economic rationalism.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Quixote [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Cervantes

This article is not so much about artists failing in their careers, financially or otherwise.

It seems to be more about failing in more of a "project failed to come to fruition" sense. It's claiming that patrons and other financial supporters are being too conservative, asking for too much certainty about the finished product and not being tolerant enough of projects that fail to produce or may fail to produce.

This in turn is making artists & art too conservative, and not exploring enough risky ideas.

The perspective for the normative (being too conservative; shouldn't chastize) appears to "for the sake of art" rather than the "for society/economy/artist wellbeing" I think you're responding from.

A tech startup analogy is pretty straightforward. If investors are too risk averse (eg avoiding startups with execution risk), the odds of big wins go down. Art, like startups is risky. Low failure rates can be a bad sign, and lower overall "returns."

> It's claiming that patrons and other financial supporters are being too conservative, asking for too much certainty about the finished product

There's a reason for this, of course - most customers don't want to incur hard-to-assess risk. Creators could deal with this by self-insuring and offering some sort of money-back guarantee, but of course this comes with additional challenges-- including having to raise a larger amount in the first place to offset the possibility of failure, which still makes for sharply-lower "tolerance" of failure-prone projects! In general, it could even be that just letting the chips fall where they may is the least bad approach, for all its clear drawbacks.

So many of the artists we treasure today were completely undervalued in their time and died without knowing any kind of success.

This isn't unique to art though. I can't name the inventor of any product in my home. No idea why came up with the architectural style of the building, etc.

The fact that you can't name them does not mean they didn't get recognized and/or wealthy for their inventions.

It's not my understanding that most inventors are recognized and/or wealthy. I feel like the cultural references we know are the exceptions that prove the rule. Edison, for example, is credited with inventing the light bulb. He was definitely wealthy, but there were a number of other inventors who contributed but have little to no recognition and did not become wealthy.

One area where it always bothered me that artists weren't allowed to fail is in public school art classes. In my experience they are generally graded based on participation rather than on whether the student actually learns the techniques being taught. In turn I think that's because there's generally not anything actually being taught. It's basically just crafts time.

Art classes would actually be useful if students were expected to learn things like color theory, advanced techniques such as watercolor washes, the characteristics of different materials, drawing techniques, composition, anatomical drawing, etc.

My brother went to art college, and it was more or less the same there.

At the same time, putting a urinal in an art gallery is considered a significant piece of art history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_(Duchamp)

It is more complicated. That urinal in that gallery at that time by that artist had great meaning. Just as why painting soup cans can be great art, context always matters more than paint.

I tend to think that some of the issue is that people use the word "art" to refer to things that are different concepts.

I tend to feel that for something to qualify as art it has to have both philosophical merit and aesthetic merit (although I don't think the aesthetic necessarily has be be beauty). In my opinion, artists that emphasize almost exclusively the philosophical aspects of their art would be more accurately termed activists or political cartoonists; while artists who focus purely on the aesthetic aspect would be more accurately termed something like artisans.

However, that's definitely heavy into the realm of opinion and even then there are definitely huge gray areas.

>>> artists that emphasize almost exclusively the philosophical aspects of their art

Like writers? Poets? There are many types of art that are almost entirely philosophical. What else can they emphasize?

Under the perspective that I'm proposing, both prose and poetry could be equally philosophical; however, poetry also incorporates some sort of aesthetic features such as a rhyme scheme, a pattern of syllables, rhythm of stressed syllables, etc. Therefore, poetry would be "art" in the sense that I am talking about but prose would not be.

However, I that this example brings up some interesting points:

- One of the problems that I think underlies these discussions is that many people think that something must be "art" in order to be profound/valuable/important/expressive. However, I'd argue that things like prose philosophy and oral storytelling can be equally profound/valuable/important/expressive.

- Like I said before, there are definitely gray areas. I just argued that poetry was art but prose is not due to poetry's use of aesthetic features. However, it can't a story incorporate significant aesthetic features both in the form of techniques like metaphor and in the use of sumptuous descriptions?

- I think the previous point might suggest that there can be different degrees to which or different senses in which something is art. For example, we might say that poetry is art relative to a prose novel but that the novel is art relative to a science paper. Or we might say that a beautifully engraved beer stein is not art in the sense that it does not have any philosophical meaning but it is art in the sense that it goes beyond the simply utilitarian to incorporate the aesthetic.

But what was the meaning? The artist's meaning was that art - or what we think of as art - is not actually possible, so a urinal is just as much "art" as anything else is. The art critics (don't know about the gallery) thought that it was pretty, and so they accepted it as art, which horrified the artist, because they completely missed his point.

Source: "Saving Leonardo", by Nancy Pearcey.

Or he was saying that he thought all the other art there was trash, that a urinal was more interesting. It was also placed on its back, an unussual orientation. So it was a statement on perspective too.

This comes about because people can't get past the idea that art is a natural gift, whereas it is in most part a learnable skill. My thinking on this changed after watching the Great Course's "How to Draw" lectures [1]. Dr. Brody explains most people don't realize that with effort and practice they can learn to draw effectively; that it's not something you're born with.

If you accept that it can be decomposed into small skills, which can be practiced, and aggregated to create effective art, then it can be tested and graded.

[1] https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/how-to-draw.html

Many people will say "I draw like a six-year old" but that's really because that's around the time when they stopped. Some people learn faster the skills faster than others but that's the same with math or science or any other skill.

The english alphabet is made up of 52 drawings that billions of people have learned. Everyone can draw them in some form because they practiced and it was required in school. Those same skills can be used in drawing anything. It's similar from being taught addition and then working your way up to calculus.

Having those skills doesn't necessarily produce great art but everyone can certainly learn how to draw or paint or sculpt. There's really no magic there.

When people say they can’t draw, they aren’t referring to being able to draw a simple geometric shape like a letter. They mean a portrait or a still life or landscape or something.

That's not what I'm saying. I understand they are saying they can't draw a portrait but what I'm saying is the only reason is because the skills usually weren't taught past a certain level. Those same geometric shapes are used in the construction of everything else.

It's the same skill, just a different degree of practice. Depending on your skill level drawing involves a lot of simple geometric shapes and then using those shapes as a point of reference to draw the final result. The reason why art seems so difficult is because people don't see the intermediate steps which were taken, they only see the final result.

a lot of artists and their fanbase think its a point of pride that they don't have formal education in art, as if they are a child prodigy

the customers they wish they could sell too would not consider that a point of pride

that prodigy should go to a prestigious art school, for the techniques or network alone

My art classes barely involved any teaching at all. We were basically showed what type of art we should create and then were told to produce one good art piece per over the course of a month. Obviously it doesn't work that way. First of all we are standing on the shoulders of giants. 99% of the time this means reading books and following their instructions. Second, your first attempt at anything is going to completely fail. You need practice, practice, practice. Your second attempt will be better than your first but we never got that chance. Your third will be even better than the second and so on. The way lessons should be structured would be to draw at least 5 small pictures every lesson with the expectation that you throw them away. Then at the end of the month, you could just pick your best one and show that one to your parents instead.

> a project is either "successful" and meets its funding goal, or "fails" because it doesn't.

This guy works at kickstarter, so his definition of success should be "when backers get what they paid for" not when kickstarter gets paid. This attitude is symptomatic of this company's callous disregard for its own customers and the proliferation of scams and frauds on its service.

but his point was that the people funding the kickstarter should not consider an art project failed if it didn't exactly deliver what was promised. of course one can argue that such a statement from a kickstarter employee is somewhat self-serving. but the principle holds.

take a completely different example:

a startup develops software. it gets funded. it fails to make a profit. but the software is complete and released under a FOSS license. it ends up serving many people well.

for the investors that startup was a failure. for the people that benefit from the software it was a success.

this is the point here. an art project may fail, but that doesn't mean it can't still produce a benefit for society. if the latter is the case, maybe it should not be considered a total failure, but a different kind of success.

Wouldn't Kickstarter be in a position to provide the funding he thinks artists should get? Which is to say, Kickstarter could easily set up a system to allow this explicitly. Why not allow artists to ask for this kind of R&D money? As long as it is clear what is being paid for, and what the risks are, and what the money is being used for, why not?

Everyone should be allowed to fail, but how many artists are there out there that "failed" and got more ordinary jobs? (and how many out there with ordinary jobs would like to try their hand at failing to be an artist instead?)

The economy isn't willing to support very many artists, and the support is very exponential with a small number making more than anybody needs and a very long tail making nothing or near enough.

So tax Ticketmaster 10% and use the revenue to boost the NEA by a factor of 10.

Or stop spending $200 for concert tickets and buy some art you like displayed on a coffee shop wall and take interest in the local music scene.

How do they determine what failure is, and how many times do they get to fail before they stop getting funded?

I think everyone would like some money to pursue their passion, especially if it didn’t come with any accountability! The premise seems to be failure can lead to success. Yeah, maybe, but it could also just lead to more failure. You’re asking institutions and people to keep the money flowing “just cuz”

If as a professional artist, you have dramatic media articles detailing your failure to produce a particular work of art, then I think that this is actually a massive success, at least by the terms of the professional art world.

I remember article that I cannot find anymore about French action of supporting artists.

They ended with useless crap projects in their storages created just to get money off of the government.

That is why you don't support every sketch. Market is bad, but bunch of predatory freeloaders will spoil every good idea. So we are stuck with what it is, namely prove your idea first heavily and then we can reimurse you.

FWIW, there's a income tax reduction scheme in France that allows people to invest in film production companies. If the project fails, you get to write off your whole investment - no harm right ? If it makes any money, you get your share of the profit.

It's basically a free option on film production profits that the government gives out.

The total number of film productions is limited by art ministry fiat. Connected producers get the necessary yearly accreditations, and the companies are limited in how much investment they can take.

Because of this, France is the 3rd world movie producer, after Bollywood and Hollywood. They have the lowest median views per film though.

This author suffers from a serious lack of what is termed in some communities "shut up and multiply".

>few articles highlighted the positive side of her Institute morphing into its current form. MAI is now a roving institution, traveling and running workshops all over the world, effectively reaching more diverse and far-flung communities.

Except in doing so the number of artists the Institute can actually serve is crippled in comparison to an actual physical institute.

>The piece wasn’t fully realized, but, in fact, the outcome is actually somehow perfect

No it isn't. It failed to deploy at all and is currently a misshapen mass of orbital debris that doesn't even slightly resemble his intention. His backers who paid 1.3 million dollars to put a mirrored sphere into orbit were tremendously disappointed. If I pulled Starry Night off the wall and put it through a garbage disposal the outcome would not be "somehow perfect", it would be a tragedy. Bad things don't stop being bad just because you navel-gazed long enough to pull some arbitrary meaning out of them.

I'm a little confused on what they mean by "fail". The key sentence seems to be, "We can’t chastise an artist when a piece or project does not work out."

If an artist can't take chastisement, they're not prepared to do art. They are putting themselves out there: if nobody sees it, it's not art. If there wasn't a risk to it, there would be no point in the success. People not liking it is one of those risks.

That's referring to artistic rather than commercial failure, but the skill set is related. The money spent on the project is part of the artistic process.

It's a permanent problem that there is never enough money to fund all of the arts projects worth doing, and no way of knowing beforehand either artistic or commercial successes. The article is correct that people with money, who wish to fund art with it, will have to take risks and suffer commercial losses, just as the artist will suffer artistic failures.

So to the degree that the article says "Let's put more money into art that might fail," absolutely, yes. But that's not solving the ancient problem of finding that money, and we already knew that one of the problems is that a lot of people don't want their money going into any art except the most broadly appealing.

Failing is OK, as is having some wild dreams. Dragging others down with you isn't.

Not sure if we need a clear definition on what's OK and is not. I'd say there are different gradations of harm.

The article starts off with

> Alright, let’s do it, let’s talk about failure. In my role overseeing visual and performing arts at Kickstarter, failure is an everyday term—a project is either “successful” and meets its funding goal, or “fails” because it doesn’t

There is a third option for customers: funding succeeds but project either does not ship, does not ship according to specifications, or has serious product flaws.

I get that's an elephant in the room Kickstarter (and Indiegogo and such) do not want to mention.

It could be something you don't care about. I've seen left and right being confused, Mac/Linux support being dropped, launch date delay (very common) just to mention a few examples. Not every customer cares which fractures the customer base with fans and discontent former believers.

This also goes for large art institutions. In my field (classical music, in Germany) these institutions live mostly on the public purse. As a consequence, their target audience skews hard towards government grant and subsidy committees. Many put on shows nobody wants to see, that speak to nobody, but have fascinating write-ups. It is in some ways a remnant of Milton Babbitt's famous article, "who cares if you listen?"[1] except without the intellectual honesty.

Cultural institutes and funded culture agents exist not just to create art qua art, but as a part of culture - ie with an audience. Of course they should take risks and push boundaries, but not exclusively.

[1] http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html

Well, to turn the question around, how much money are you personally willing to lose on a failed project? And how many times will you back a artist that has failed? The natural human tendency is to only back 'all star' teams when it comes to such projects, or even when considering which OSS project to contribute to, or which startup to join, etc, etc. A 'winner' does more than just win, they create a positive energy that attracts people to their cause. While failure may be important for progress to happen, the key here is of course that progress must happen for the failure to be considered "good".

Everybody should be allowed to fail. It's when failing becomes a lifestyle in itself that is expected to be paid for by the general public when I object.

Reading through it seems more of an issue about people who make promises and fail to upheld them due to poor planning?

i read it being more about changes or obstacles that the artists could not possibly have forseen, yet they get chastised for failing because of something that was beyond their control.

> In studio visits with artists around the globe, I hear about the concepts they’re exploring. I see them spend vast sums of money on research before they share anything with institutions or potential patrons.

Come visit me I just doodle in my notebook it's cheap.

in essen germany, there is a place called "unperfekthaus" which is set up on that premise. artists get free workspace, and in turn they allow visitors to watch them work.

visitors pay a small entrance fee (which includes free drinks), but besides watching artists work there are also other interesting activities and even workspaces for them to use.

https://www.unperfekthaus.de/ (in german)

Thought artists rarely succeeds.. financially at least.

Only the wealthy should make a killing on works of artists after the market filters them out. While they are alive most of them should not be able to make any sort of decent living. Such is capitalism and art.

Art is a scam. It's all about social connections. It's about who is able to fool or coerce the richest person through social networking.

There certainly seems to be a lot of bullshit going on.If you mention this you will just get criticised for not being enlightened enough. As to whether it's a bad thing that the super rich are getting fooled out of their money, well I'm fairly relaxed about that.

The super rich aren't getting fooled out of money. Many are investing in art just like they invest in stocks with the hopes that they'll be able to sell it at a profit or use it as equity. Others just love art and want to buy pieces they enjoy while others want to prove they've got the biggest dick in the room.

Art is worth what the market will pay and clearly the market will pay more and more every year. Is it a bubble waiting to burst? Maybe, but it will come back over time and those artworks will be worth even more.

That's a very narrow definition of art. For every Rothko here are hundreds of amateur painters who do it for its own sake

The strongest interpretation of your argument, that the entire art market is a scheme to deprive rich fools of their money, with no role for taste and real differentiation of artistic worth is obviously untrue. Van Gogh May have known some other artists and gallerists but he sold more or less nothing during his lifetime. I’m confident there are other examples in fine art and god knows Banksy and Shepard Fairey didn’t come up out of a traditional fine art background either.

A weaker form, that the art world is incredibly incestuous and that who you know is incredibly important is true, but it still doesn’t make the entire art world a scam. Artists and gallerists believe in what they’re doing. I presume most of the rich buying art are doing so in part based on personal taste too.

This is a criticism of the contemporary art market, but surely art itself is not a scam. As for the market, the film “Exit Through The Gift Shop” is one of the most brilliant skewerings of that system.

Making money off art may be a scam. Art in itself however is not.

Artists can't fail. Art businesses however can.

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