The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

Stories of individual artistic failure raise raise the question of what might have happened if failed artists on this list had been appreciated in their own time, if those doomed to failure had instead captured the public’s imagination, sold significant art works, and continued working into old age. Or to put it another way, would we recognize the genius of a young Van Gogh or Gericault and support it in practical ways if we came across it today? Would we rise up in the moment and choose to make the world a richer, more plentiful place?

This is, of course, a futile exercise. While we can admire these artists’ creative foresight today, and we can rationalize their failure by saying “they were just (creatively speaking) ahead of their times,” the fact is there’s nothing that can be done about it now. What done is done; you can’t raise the dead; there’s no use crying over spilt turpentine. It’s probably more important for us as a society to look forward and ask questions about how difficult we continue to make the lives of the artists among us and whether we want to be participants in the creative failure of our times.

I’ve been led to believe, during my attempts to follow the art scene as an arts writer for the past ten years, that the artistic life is more difficult than ever before. Nearly every artist I’ve ever met complains of his or her lot, so that by the time I had logged my tenth piece of arts writing I was well aware, at least anecdotally, that individual artists were suffering. As early as 2001, I had profiled a few such struggling artists who made their troubled homes in Minneapolis. By 2002, I had begun to wonder if artists of this sort existed around the country, and in July, 2003, I found, visited, and wrote about an artist named Vince Roark for Review magazine in Kansas City. Roark epitomized the failure of art; he was a 70ish-year-old artist with unkempt nails and dirty clothes, who lived in a dark and cluttered apartment in a carved-up tenement house in the heart of residential Kansas City. He spent his days at a local greasy-spoon diner eating biscuits and gravy and harassing the wait staff with off-color comments and jokes. Despite his circumstances, Roark still found a way, much to my wonderment, to make art with near-manic dedication. Here’s a telling description from the original profile:

We spend the last hour of my two-day visit in Roark’s studio apartment. The space is a wreck, much like Roark. Walls have been removed down to the bare wooden slats. Cloudy sheets of acetate over the windows give the cluttered rooms a diffuse yellow light. Piles of junk—sharpie pens, straight-edges, papers, staple guns—cover every surface. Still, the disarray is comforting, as it reveals more of the artist’s endless creative energy. Something drives him to be expressive, even if he doesn’t know why, or can’t speak of it. Even though he’s earthy, offensive, mundane, and difficult to be around, he has the creative light of the artist inside him, showing through the gruff exterior.
After a time, I set up to take some photos of his studio, and he watches me. “Do you use color film?” Roark asks, suddenly. I tell him no, black and white.
“Why?” he asks. “I like color.” I explain that I’m hoping I can get some more detailed images of his dark studio this way. He is bemused and speaks in a clipped voice. “Don’t know how that would work. I love color… Without color you’d go nuts. John Ruskin said that the most thoughtful person has the highest recall for color.”

By 2003, my interest regarding artistic failure had grown to a kind of small obsession. Looking back in retrospect, this seems attributable both to the natural progression of my career investigations at that time, as well as to the zeitgeist. The spring and summer of 2003 were a low period in many creative people’s lives, and the arts and artists in Minnesota and elsewhere were suffering with more intensity than usual. The Minnesota State Arts Board—one of the oldest and most traditionally vaunted such agencies in the United States—in 2003, at the prodding of the governor’s office, had had its funding unceremoniously cut by between 33 and 60 percent (depending on which budget line you were looking at). At the same time, two of the three main arts-supporting foundations in the area, facing acute endowment shrinkage and resulting budget problems, curtailed and cut support for artists and organizations and postponed several new initiatives that many people had anticipated. By quick and unofficial estimation, the overall charitable and governmental support of arts in 2004 was reduced in Minnesota by about 40-50 percent. It should come as no surprise, then, that several notable local arts organizations—such as Minnesota Film Arts, the Minnesota Craft Council, the American National Ballet company (out of Duluth) and Ballet Arts Minnesota (out of Minneapolis)—as well as a wide swath of the local gallery scene saw the first signs in 2004 of struggles that would lead them to the edge of insolvency and beyond. Few small to medium-sized arts organizations have thrived in Minnesota since 2003, and overall wages for arts workers have declined along with programs and offerings.

Beyond the wider systemic struggles for the arts in Minnesota and elsewhere, in 2003 everything I knew and was comfortable with—my twelve-year-old marriage, my six-year-old art critic gig with City Pages, my previously sane and safe country—was also failing. My falling out with City Pages occurred in November of that year, when my arts editor decided, after six years of collaboration and nearly 60 stories on art, the paper didn’t need my writing any longer. City Pages had been facing ever more pressure to find advertisers and needed the space for more and more buzz-creating sensationalism, and I refused to participate in this trend. “We’ve done a lot of great stories,” the editor told me over the phone, “things that I’m really proud of. But sometimes editors and writers just have to end their association. It just happens.”

Nothing was right in 2003. I can think of no better explanation than this as to why I suddenly refocused my writerly investigations to quest after answers regarding artistic failure. In the two years following the summer of 2003 I wrote four essays on what I was calling the “doomed artist,” and I wrote three profiles of such artists in Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York. I applied for, and received, a grant from the Jerome Foundation to visit and write about such artists in Atlanta, Colorado, and Pittsburgh. In all the spare time I could muster outside my day job, I was eating, breathing, and sweating artistic failure.

This was not a particularly easy quest to sustain. One problem artists who talk about the struggles of their lives do not make terribly reliable witnesses. Artists, like most people, see the world through their own slanted point of view, and they often cast aspersions on anyone who seems not to be on their side. While I spent as much time as I could recording the details of these artists’ occasionally squalid existences and I poked around the fringes like a good journalist to find corroborating evidence supporting the hypothesized doom, questions continued to nag at me about how statistically real was this notion of artistic failure. I researched and found, as it happens, it is extremely difficult—due to the large and diverse numbers of artists in the country, the particular difficulties in tracking them, the wide variety of artistic disciplines and their independent economies, and so on—to quantify the economy of artists in any given era. Census data, for instance, is unreliable in delineating the different kinds of working artists, and all sorts of artists—from graphic designers and architects to workaday sculptors and professional macramé-ists—get lumped together in one statistical category.

By the spring of 2005, after two years of research and story writing, I had seen glimpses of the truth, but nothing more. I had no idea precisely how many artists actually do fail and how such numbers compare to, say, the numbers of artists who make a success of their careers. I had no clue whether the times are worse for artists today, or if times are simply as they always were.

This meant a conundrum: I could listen indefinitely to the stories of artists and write endless stories on the subject—gaining a rather sour reputation for myself and getting no closer to the empirical truth—or I could do some hard work to dig further. I took the latter course, swallowing my concerns about money and the advancing age of my intellect to enter, in the spring of 2005, a quick mid-career one-year program in arts administration at the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Here, among other activities, I spawned and incubated a four-month group research project called Essential Services for Aging Artists (ESAA) that made use of data from focus-group discussions of artists in New York, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh and a survey of more than 1,300 artists currently working nation-wide to produce, in the spring of 2006, a full 180-page report on the subject of aging artists. The goals of the report were to gain a clearer understanding of the problems and needs that visual artists face as they age, to research and list services that currently exist to address these needs, to pinpoint needs still unaddressed, and to make recommendations for addressing these needs. In other words, it was a study of artistic failure and a primer on what was best to do about it.

The second-most common definition of “artistic failure” is one applied to an individual artist who has reached an inevitable career-stage of decline, dessication, despair, and destitution. The more common term for this sort of figure is “failed artist,” as in, an artist whose career has run its course and cannot be revived. (Sometimes these artists keep working, despite all odds, and produce work in poverty-striken obscurity; more often, these artists give up the struggle and move on to other life work.)

But there is no universally accepted term for the artist who deemed a failure. Neither term above is as well known as “starving artist,” which has much of the same implication of the first two but no hint of the finality (a “starving” artist, while failing, has not yet “starved,” and still may have a chance to someday eat; that may be the onl carrot, so to speak, that keeps the artist going). For a time, in a dozen or so articles, essays, and profiles I wrote on artists in decline, I preferred the term “doomed artist” (for examples of such stories, g0 here, here, and here). This is mostly because “failed artist” seemed such an absolute judgment and because, at the time, I was more sympathetic toward artists than I am now and wanted to shift some of the blame for their failure away from themselves and on to the fates, society at large, or other forces.

In a quick graduate stint in arts management that I did two years ago, I studied what happens to artists as their career progresses (surveying more than 1,300 artists nation-wide–I will write more on this later). To avoid offending any of our survey subjects from the onset, we applied the carefully-chosen term “aging artists” to them. This is also a term that has been used by Columbia University in their studies of the welfare of artists–it’s a neutral term that at once protects these studies from bias related to scaring potential subjects away (who don’t want to be labeled “failed” or “doomed”), but this term also takes the meat right out of the argument. The Bush Foundation of Minnesota, meanwhile, has taken this sanitization one step further. It uses the term “Enduring Visions” to describe its new program of grants for older artists who may be neglected or forgotten by the wider culture.

Whatever definition you choose, the topic of the “failed artist,” has been growing in popularity in recent years. When Googled, the phrase gets a hit-count of more than 2.6 million. This makes sense: With more and more people studying art in college and taking it on as a profession (there was a 300 percent increase in self-identified artists between 1971 and 2000, culminating in there being 1.9 million artists in the 2000 census), there is more concern about failure than ever before among artists. It just follows–having more artists means more of them will worry about not succeeding.

Artists who have never made a dent in the art world are fixated on the idea of “artistic failure.” In 2001, Jonathan Kranz made a commentary on National Public Radio about being a “failed artist,” and being happy about the fact, as it meant, among other things, he didn’t have to worry about worry for the rest of his life where his food was coming from. This blog, meanwhile, talks about the writer’s personal experiences in artistic failure, and this blog takes umbrage at the fact that artists who fail are treated differently from other professionals who give up their practice (i.e., they are dubbed “failed artists”; or as the blogger writes: I have never heard anyone say, “He is a failed accountant.” When someone moves on from being an accountant, no one says anything negative. It is accepted that this person moved onto another career….As with any other profession, those in the arts grow and make various career choices depending on the opportunities available.)

Still, it’s not only the artists-who-never-were who think about artistic failure. Even very successful artists fixate on the idea. I have written several times about Alec Soth, arguably the most successful artist in Minnesota in recent years–once, right before he became an art star by appearing in the 2004 Whitney Biennial (note: this is probably my favorite arts journalism piece that I ever wrote; very worth a read, if I do say so myself), and once just after. The before and after versions of Soth were as different as red and blue. The before-Biennial Soth was carefree and funny, a serious worker who brought a mirthful perspective to his tasks (essentially coaxing complete strangers to let him photograph them). The after-Biennial Soth, harried and now concerned about each risky venture he was undertaking as part of his artistic practice, was ultimately worried about how long this string of success would last. Or, as I quoted him at the end of the post-Biennial story: “I know I got lucky. Just the fact that anyone knows who I am now is fascinating to me. That anyone in the photography world in New York has heard of me is a new concept…. It’s a great feeling. But I wonder if it’s going to last.”

The topic of the “failed artist” is an important one in the art world today, as the artistic economy is increasingly tenuous, as individual artistic failure mounts (even among once-successful artists), and as concern about eventual failure becomes a major facet of artistic life.

The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America will refer to these facts of the artistic life, of course, and will remain fully aware of these definitions of “artistic failure,” often describing artists and other situations that fit the definition. At the same time, the Chronicle will forge a new meaning of the   term “artistic failure,” one that means something completely different.

Stay tuned for the conclusion of this long defining saga…