Joel Fisher - Success of Failure

The article deals with a fundamental question of the role of failure in artistic pursuit. Traditionally, "Success" has been defined as the achievement of a finished product or perfection. This definition of success inherently means that there are a lot more instances of failure in our world. All the risks to achieving a goal are termed as "failures".

Traditionally, unfinished work is viewed as failure because abandoning the pursuit of work is usually thought to be in recognition of the fact that continuing on that path to the logical end will lead to failure. However, another way of looking at this is to imagine a work to be complete at every point in its development and thus there is technically no "unfinished work" that can be easily categorized as failure.

This new, "non-definite" nature of failure can benefit us in a few different ways in the pursuit of art:
-- The fear of failure can be a good indication of how far we are comfortable to push ourselves. Perseverance through this point can lead to the "success" of an approach/idea/process and give us more tools for the future.
-- Having a goal that is almost impossible to reach can be another driver of failure (in the conventional - achieving perfection terms). However, pursuit of such a goal can lead to the opposite of failure as it can help expand the pursuit and the final work to a point that could not have been achievable otherwise

We tend to deal with success publicly and failure personally. However, the biggest risk is the risk of not recognizing a failure to ourselves. An acknowledged failure becomes a lesson and a stepping stone for the next pursuit (and hence doesn't end up being a "failure"). On the other hand, not recognizing failure and dealing with it makes the pursuit of any idea much harder. Every analysis of failure can teach us more about our self, or the pursuit of an idea, and thus can only benefit our growth.

A scientific method or inquiry relies solely on the pursuit of failure. Every hypothesis that is tested is with the expectation of finding failure. By failing again and again science inevitably leads to success. This is in contrast with the art world, where "success" is highly valued and stressed. This inhibits the pursuit of playful "experiments" in art. Public success in art is placed so high that it becomes difficult to pursue a path fraught with the idea of failures. This ends up resulting in creating highly skilled craftsmen rather than skilled investigators of ideas and curiosity in the art community. Even though a purely scientific approach to art might be an extreme, there is a middle ground of allowing artists to take liberties in pursuit and failure and taking pleasure in the little failures rather than create an expectation of epic success.