The Masterpiece: The Art Of Failure
Lisa Le Feuvre
Introduction/ / Strive to Fail
Uncertainty and instability characterize these times. Nonetheless, success and progress endure as a condition to strive for, even though there is little faith in either. All individuals and societies know failure better than they might care to admit - failed romance, failed careers, failed politics, failed humanity, failed failures. Even if one sets out to fail , the possibility of success is never eradicated, and failure once again is ushered in.
In the realm of art, though, failure has a different currency. Failure, by definition, takes us beyond assumptions and what we think we know. Artists have long turned their attention to the unrealizability of the quest for perfection, or the …show more content…
The Parisian Salon des Refuses of 1863, for example, was an exhibition of failures . At the time, the Salon was an ultimate site of artists' validation; in 1863
12/ / INTRODUCTION
the Academicians rejected around 3,000 works that they felt challenged the criteria and authority of the Academy of Fine Arts. The outcry at these exclusions, which included works by Whistler and Manet, led to an alternative exhibition of rejects alongside the official selection.3 Emile Zola included the event in his 1886 novel The Masterpiece, describing artists desperate to be removed from the official selection to the Salon des Refuses, as the 'failures' were far more relevant to their work than those approved by the academicians.4 For an artist to lace a • work into the world is to lose control. What does refusal mean? Who are the arbiters of taste? Failure here becomes a pivotal term, rejected by one group, embraced by another.
When failure is released from being a judgemental term, and success deemed overrated, the embrace of failure can become an act of bravery, of daring to go beyond normal practices and enter a realm of not-knowing. In 1953 Robert
Rauschenberg proposed to Willem de Kooning his Erased de /(ooning
Introduction/ / Strive to Fail
Uncertainty and instability characterize these times. Nonetheless, success and progress endure as a condition to strive for, even though there is little faith in either. All individuals and societies know failure better than they might care to admit - failed romance, failed careers, failed politics, failed humanity, failed failures. Even if one sets out to fail , the possibility of success is never eradicated, and failure once again is ushered in.
In the realm of art, though, failure has a different currency. Failure, by definition, takes us beyond assumptions and what we think we know. Artists have long turned their attention to the unrealizability of the quest for perfection, or the …show more content…
The Parisian Salon des Refuses of 1863, for example, was an exhibition of failures . At the time, the Salon was an ultimate site of artists' validation; in 1863
12/ / INTRODUCTION
the Academicians rejected around 3,000 works that they felt challenged the criteria and authority of the Academy of Fine Arts. The outcry at these exclusions, which included works by Whistler and Manet, led to an alternative exhibition of rejects alongside the official selection.3 Emile Zola included the event in his 1886 novel The Masterpiece, describing artists desperate to be removed from the official selection to the Salon des Refuses, as the 'failures' were far more relevant to their work than those approved by the academicians.4 For an artist to lace a • work into the world is to lose control. What does refusal mean? Who are the arbiters of taste? Failure here becomes a pivotal term, rejected by one group, embraced by another.
When failure is released from being a judgemental term, and success deemed overrated, the embrace of failure can become an act of bravery, of daring to go beyond normal practices and enter a realm of not-knowing. In 1953 Robert
Rauschenberg proposed to Willem de Kooning his Erased de /(ooning