The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

Before I reveal more about how The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America defines the term “artistic failure,” here are two interesting quotations on the matter. The first is very recent, and discusses the built-in tendency of modernist art to “fail.” The second is from the 2005 movie Stay.

From the September, 2007, edition of the Brooklyn Rail, in an interview of Jay Bernstein, Chair and University Distinguished Professor in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research:

Rail: There’s a point where you speak of art’s necessity to undertake impossible acts.

Bernstein: Modern art is the only kind of art that needs to, and does flag, its own constitutive failure. Every work of modernist art necessarily fails. When I say this I mean not by failing in artistic terms, but in failing at the one thing that art really wants to do: to be part of the world, to be real and not semblance. Art only exists in its distance from everyday life, and yet no art wants that distance. The fundamental impulse, I believe, of every artist is that art should be worldly—not an autonomous area, not stuck in museums, but part of how we make sense of ourselves in the world. The perverse ambition of minimalism to make mere things—which of course art as art cannot do—was a deep and authentic impulse. Even the most successful modernist art, in that very success, necessarily fails. The best of modern art has refined ways of acknowledging this failure. Because we hate the idea of failure and love the idea of success and achievement, it’s not easy to say that art lives off of its incapacity, lives off of its constant failing. But I think that’s right.

From the movie Stay, a character named Henry Letham (played by Ryan Gosling) quotes the imaginary artist Tristan Reveur:

“Bad art is more tragically beautiful than good art, because it documents human failure.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 8:13 am and is filed under Modernism and artistic failure, Artistic failure in movies, Definition of Artistic Failure, Artistic failure in America. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.