Mark Robinson examines how the funding system affects the arts sector’s attitude to failure.
I write beneath a postcard on my office wall. It’s an image by Tom Philips of Samuel Beckett incorporating the lines “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.” So when invited to write this piece, I thought, “Great. After all, what can go wrong? It’ll either be grand, or no one will notice, or it’ll be a failure,” which will be a comment in itself. Well, I didn’t think exactly that, but it is the kind of irritating thing you hear cultural people say about failure. I want to argue that our attitude to the F word needs to move on from silence and flippancy. We need to be less romantic and more measured, so that we can take failure seriously, but also learn, succeed and change.
Some people have the word failure ringing in their ears – inhabiting and inhibiting. It makes them cautious, and over-compliant with fashion or instruction. In every potential project they see the things that might not work. Their work remains modest and safe, so they feel less vulnerable. They rarely go down in history. Others love failure. Artists and arts organisations must, they say, have the right to fail if they are to truly succeed. Insolvency and bankruptcy are just bumps in the road. They talk of “the glory of failure”. It can be exciting and liberating spending time with these people. Others mention failure only in passing. They hurry on to learning and how failure taught them everything they know. They say there’s no failure except the failure to learn. Some believe that one day things will turn to gold, if they just keep experimenting. And some people admit nothing... Keep reading on Native
I write beneath a postcard on my office wall. It’s an image by Tom Philips of Samuel Beckett incorporating the lines “No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail Better.” So when invited to write this piece, I thought, “Great. After all, what can go wrong? It’ll either be grand, or no one will notice, or it’ll be a failure,” which will be a comment in itself. Well, I didn’t think exactly that, but it is the kind of irritating thing you hear cultural people say about failure. I want to argue that our attitude to the F word needs to move on from silence and flippancy. We need to be less romantic and more measured, so that we can take failure seriously, but also learn, succeed and change.
Some people have the word failure ringing in their ears – inhabiting and inhibiting. It makes them cautious, and over-compliant with fashion or instruction. In every potential project they see the things that might not work. Their work remains modest and safe, so they feel less vulnerable. They rarely go down in history. Others love failure. Artists and arts organisations must, they say, have the right to fail if they are to truly succeed. Insolvency and bankruptcy are just bumps in the road. They talk of “the glory of failure”. It can be exciting and liberating spending time with these people. Others mention failure only in passing. They hurry on to learning and how failure taught them everything they know. They say there’s no failure except the failure to learn. Some believe that one day things will turn to gold, if they just keep experimenting. And some people admit nothing... Keep reading on Native