A Guide for the (Fail) Artist

Notes, thoughts and random observations about art and the human condition. And some jokes.

‘If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again’ – Mark Rothko

‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’ - common utterance

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All art and writing about art are a case of projection. Contrary to the standard belief that there exists an objective reality somewhere ‘out there,’ a reality that can be apprehended, measured, quantified, studied, received and passed on, the artist insists that this is false, because the failure of the arts to effectively capture reality in-itself through the act of creation, an act that follows nature more closely than science, which intervenes and attempts to remake nature according to itself, is evidence that failure, unlike success, is what gives nature and reality its dynamism. Without failure there is no change and without change there is no progress. All things eventually fail.

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There are two major artistic traditions, success and failure. The successful artist often fails where the fail artist succeeds and the fail artist succeeds where the successful artist fails, in the brief window of opportunity one gets to define to oneself the meaning of success and failure. Thus, a fail artist can easily become a success without the need for optimism.

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One’s ability to create art does not make one into an artist. ‘Artist’ is not a job description, a frame of mind, a profession, or a type of expertise, though an artist is an entity upon which the cruelty and sardonic sense of humor of nature had conspired to impose a mind incapable of rationality, conformity, and sensibility. A successful artist has the ability to conform to the direction of the market while the fail artist must conform to the passions that drive the creative process, regardless of the danger posed to one’s career, opportunity and position in the cultural moment.

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To be a successful artist is not a prerequisite for making good or interesting art. Success and failure are pathologies of the market, not of life. To fail at life is to die. It is ok for the artist to not make art. It is even ok for the artist to make bad art. These do not constitute failure. To fail out of the market is as easy for the artist as it is to succeed into it. Both are beyond the artist’s agency.

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The word ‘art’ is an abyss of meaning. There is nothing more vague, overused and abused than this word that strives to reconcile the useless with whatever is merely aesthetic. In their quest to rob the word of every last inch of meaning, some have instead turned the narrative by insisting that art is anything that is beautiful or that which turns a profit, the more beautiful and more profitable, the better. This turn isn’t wrong, but it is suspicious. On the other hand, the word ‘artist’ is a fountain of misplaced projections. To a pessimist, such a title is a condemnation. The condition of the artist is not one that any ‘normal’ person would wish to bring upon themselves. Filled with striving, unfulfilled aspirations, and failed propositions, the life of the average artist consists mainly of chasing clouds and closing the gaps left open by life’s misfortunes. The artist is thus a supplicant to the religious dogma of inner drives and desires. Failure is the angel of ignorance and success the guardian protecting the artist from disenchantment with the world-as-is.

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Disenchantment is an ‘a priori’ state for the artist. The constant need to create is the need to reconstitute the world in the most sensible and least practical way imaginable. For everything to be in its place in the world, the artist must first find it out of place and then to reimagine and recombine the ‘it’ as a set of conditions that satisfy the ‘a priori’ state.

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To witness the success of another artist and to be ignored is a fate worse than death. To witness the rise of a bad artist into prominence is cause for insanity. In response, the fail artist retreats into irrationality and goes on to make more art that nobody wants and call this condition self-care.

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The artist’s best and most useful tool is doubt. To doubt means to discern. There is not a shred of evidence for the existence of ‘art,’ despite the historical record and the value ascribed to it. If art can be anything, then art must also be nothing. It is folly to think that anything can be raised to the level of art, if art itself is always in doubt.

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Among the most famous citizens of any country are often artists; Marina Abramovic in Serbia, Bjork in Iceland, Elvis in America, Joseph Beuys in Germany. In my home country Czech Republic the most famous artists are Vaclav Havel, a playwright who became president, and Jara Cimrman, a late 19th and early 20th century renaissance man, a writer, painter, playwright, scientist, musician and musicologist, detective, teacher, and activist. The problem is that Cimrman never existed. There is something utterly funny and terrifying that a Country counts amongst its most famous people a fictional character. Havel and Cimrman have a lot in common, both were playwrights and both failed spectacularly at their craft. The entire ouvre of Cimrman, is written with the intention to fail and it is through that failure that the greatest success comes in the guise of ‘post-humous’ fame. Cimrman, like Havel, are fantasmatic projections of the anxieties of a nation and both are set up to fail, perhaps to show that a government composed in great part of artists has only one direction it can take, into the gutters. In Czech Republic, the greatest honors and fame are afforded to those most inadequate and ill equipped to take on the concurrent political moment, so as to fulfill the national destiny of failing up against historical time. Cimrman fails up against the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Havel fails against the pressures of capitalism from the right and a dying socialism from the left.

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The greatest failure must ultimately be a success by definition

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The greatest fail artist is the painter. The painter has the ability to turn worthless materials into literal gold, to make something out of nothing, to turn water into wine without the need of becoming Christ, but often fails to secure the results of one’s labor for oneself. The danger is that the painter will become complacent when one’s wallet is full. Worse, they will become (in)famous. To join the ranks with the famous painters Rothko, Newman, Frankenthaler, Richter, Guston, is to also join in with the hacks who could not help themselves and answered the pathetic inner voice of creativity, failing forever upward with the help of their wealth and/or infamy, George W. Bush, George Zimmerman, John Wayne Gacy, James Franco. Even America’s favorite fail son Hunter Biden is now a painter, skipping past any and all formal and informal training and education or even modicum of internal need or desire to paint, he is moving straight to the top, circumventing all the struggles a conventional painter must take to become even remotely good or interesting. We must thus discern the difference between the two species of the fail artist. The first is the artist, whose failings are an inherent part of their psyche, constitution and condition, that drive their art rather than their career and make it better over time. There may be a career waiting for them after many years of trial, struggle and failure, though they will likely be subject in a string of semi-related jobs from teaching to carpentry. The first species encompasses the majority of artists living today. The second species of artist constitutes the smallest minority of artists, who in their failure to produce substantive artistic or intellectual work nonetheless fail up in their careers due to their connections, fame, legacy, status and sheer dumb luck of the draw.

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The creative act is an act of redemption. Failure teaches the soul the benefits of secular prayer. Success turns the creative act into a stale religion. And yet, the creative act itself functions as a repeated mantra, a postponement of ever-possible failure and a future in which all failures will one day be redeemed by eventual success. The artist strives to be a martyr.

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Fail history. Those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it, is one of the most abused phrases. It is used by the radicals and reactionaries, by the moderates, the right, left and center, because everyone believes that their version of ‘knowing’ and of history, is correct. The phrase is an obfuscation of its true meaning. It means that history belies the impossibility, or failure, to grasp and understand the perspective of the ‘other’ regardless of the availability of evidence and documented material to be able to do so. There are no correct vantage points and no amount of lenses through which to look at the world that will make one individual ‘truly’ understand another individual, one culture to understand another culture, another state, another tribe and so on. We are thus doomed to failure in our endeavor to properly historicize or document our individual and collective history. The phrase is a truism that continues to be misunderstood because it is undergirded by an anxious attachment of humanity to the notion of predetermined failure.

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3:14 am. The hour of the wolf. Failure to sleep. But perhaps a moment for needed reflection away from the thoughts of the day. Failure sublimated into creativity.

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‘Being born as the greatest failure. Living as its alibi’ – Eugene Thacker

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Fail digital. At the top of my copy of Word 2010 on every document – ‘product activation failed’ – yet the product continues to function, perhaps despite itself. Isn’t it a fitting metaphor for systemic failure whose ultimate result is the continued functioning of the system as if nothing abnormal occurred? Crises, disasters, catastrophes, these are not aberrations, distortions or symptoms of systems, they are fully priced in at the outset. All one has to do is ignore the failure long enough.

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Fail philosophy. The taking on of increasingly extreme positions against another ends in irony.

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Fail environmentalism. We should be asking the question, for whom are we trying to save the planet? If it is for all the people that are currently engaged in destroying it by extracting ever greater natural and human resources from it through enslaving millions in the act of that extraction, in order to capture the greatest amount of market share, profit, political power, or influence and poison the minds and steal the future of the young generations, for little more than simple amusement of those who will never see the consequences their ‘lifestyles’ have on precisely those whose labor is most exploited to create and supplement it and is thus most expendable because it is invisible, then we should probably just let everything burn to the ground and let the rising oceans sweep the debris away. The experiment has failed and it is time to start over from scratch. Misanthropy as a new humanism.

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The postmodern fail resume.

• Dirt Farmer

• Uber Driver

• Blogger

• YouTuber/Vlogger

• Redditor/WallStreetBets Shitposter

• Robinhood Day Trader

• Crypto Investor

• TikTok Financial Analyst

• NFT Artist

• Dirt Farmer

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‘The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism, is not being exploited by capitalism.’ The eloquence of capitalist realism. The beauty of totality.

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The failure of creativity is philosophy. The failure of philosophy is art.

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Thacker’s ‘Taxonomy of Failure’ for the artist:

Failure of meaning (Warhol/Pop Art)

Success through failure (Pollock/Abstract Expressionism)

Failure of pictorial representation (Mondrian/Modernism)

Failure at the breaking point between the inner and outer self (Bacon, Nerdrum/Surrealism)

Chaotic failure, social disintegration (Dada)

Failing upward (Neo-expressionism/Zombie Abstraction)

Understanding the stakes of failure, failing anyway (Stuckism)

Beautiful failure (Street/Graffiti Art)

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Art is the visual equivalent of making pronouncements for which one lacks justification.

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