Artists worldwide face at least one inevitable event that they will want to redo, forget or deny.
In a perfect vacuum-world where we work on things until we’re happy with them and that’s it, failure is nearly impossible. The moments we don’t like to talk about are usually brought to you by people you’re trying to impress telling you that they don’t like your work.
This can come in many forms, including but not limited to an email, a facial expression, a piece of paper on a bulletin board or face-to-face confrontation.
I’ve been there multiple times. My work has gotten rejected from gallery shows, placed me at the end of a section in orchestra (or not placed at all) and had professors stare at me utterly uninspired after unveiling a project.
I’m still a happy artist but I can confirm that, when it happens, it sucks equally across all mediums.
We know failure when it strikes because something didn’t go the way we hoped it would.
We know it from the feeling because there’s nothing quite like putting a naked piece of your soul in a tangible medium and someone saying to some capacity, “ew.”
But what does it really mean to fail? It’s not a permanent condition even when it’s epic, so what is it about a stigmatized obstacle that is so earth-shattering?
I guess there’s pride involved. Art is a subjective field, so it feels personal when your work isn’t well received. When we feel personally victimized by our respective medium’s Regina George, a common response is to transform that statement into a ruling that somehow lessens the value of everything we’ve ever created.
Failure, however big or small, demands us to ask questions. There’s the destructive side of that: i.e. running in mental circles at 5 a.m. about your value as an artist because your ideas are being challenged.
If you have haters, maybe you’re onto something. You’d be in good company with… really, any immortalized artist who ever lived.
But if you aren’t on the right track, a beautiful, stinging setback can lead to the best kind of questioning. When I get a lovely curveball right to the face, especially if it comes after a string of success, suddenly instinct isn’t enough of an excuse to dictate my work’s content.
Failure makes you more conscious of what you’re creating. It can be freeing, allowing for the perfect opportunity to experiment.
Even a series of failures doesn’t stop you from succeeding at the same thing in a different way.
If you’re not accepted into a graduate program, that’s a handful of people that likely share a similar aesthetic; there’s a mentor elsewhere that sees great potential. If every publishing house in the world has rejected your novel, edit it again or write something new. Failure leads to alternate paths and that doesn’t mean sacrificing greatness.
Maybe everything I’ve said isn’t dramatic enough to constitute failing, but I couldn’t think of some form of catastrophic rejection that wouldn’t feel relatively small by the end of a career.
No matter the failure, no matter the magnitude, no matter whether failure truly exists or not, there’s always room for one more unique voice in the field.
