Is failure a useful word anymore?
The newest episode of The Side Woo with Rebekah Goldstein. On the menu: unmonumental cornbread
When I first conceived Art Date, I briefly lost my mind and thought that I might start a brand new podcast. Today, looking down the barrel of the gun that is my production schedule and goals for the coming year, I laughed at silly me for being so extra.
Instead, dear reader, I will be folding The Side Woo podcast into the mix of the art date. I will be testing out the waters of releasing a new episode every week, and so will send out a free podcast-themed newsletter every Thursday, in addition to the other lunchtime goodies other days of the week.
Because I have already recorded a couple of interviews while I was temporarily insane and they are too good not to share, I will be releasing them on The Side Woo over the next month. The first of said interviews is with friend, inspiration, paintress and founder of Bay Area lecture series The Painting Salon, Rebekah Goldstein.
Talking with her I was grateful to now be 10+ years out of grad school and looking back on our journeys thus far. As of the time of the recording, she was just going to have her first solo show in New York. I, perhaps with the maturity of my 4th decade, can be genuinely happy for her. It’s not something I maybe always could have done, or always can do. But it feels great to be happy for her success.
Rebekah Goldstein in her studio
Not to get too smug though. In an earlier episode of The Side Woo, Liz and I spoke with the prolific Substacker and podcaster
of Bad at Keeping Secrets who admitted to feeling the scarcity cloud that comes over you when you see someone getting something you want, or think you want. In Carissa’s case, she mentioned she had a ping of jealousy when she saw Jenny Odell’s new book, Saving Time: Discovering Life Beyond a Clock, at a bookstore in Oakland, despite having published many of her own wonderful books and articles.After comparing notes, we discovered that while we each had slightly different ways of dealing with this ugly competitive feeling, the common ground to neutralizing it was making it a practice to internalize someone else’s success as our own.
I don’t want to speak for Carissa, but how I am personally trying to respond to the knee-jerk annoyance of seeing an artist friend or colleague get an award or show that I want, is to ask myself what if this was me? Then I try to imagine that I can have this too. Is this even something I want if I literally could have the exact same thing? Or would I want something else?
If it is something I would want and I am still feeling grumpy about someone’s success, I do something I learned taking Joanne Menon’s ACIM class: I start to imagine a bubble of light around both of us and the opportunity and try to expand it. I do this because I noticed that when I started thinking about the one person with the one thing, the world and the potential paths to happiness get really small.
By creating this energetic bubble, I think of it as a reminder to remember how massive the world is, and how many possibilities are out there. The further you expand, you can include more people in your light bubble. Like, what if we all get what we want? How does that feel?
In Rebekah’s episode, one of the things that we talked about, which is a by-product of the format for this now-defunct Art Date podcast, is an ArtForum article that was written in 1993 and rereleased through the special archive edition that they send out in their emails every week called The Loser Thing: Rhonda Lieberman on the Art of Failure.
What we both agreed on is how far we have come in terms of how we see the concept of “failure.” There’s the whole tech bro concept of fail-up that I will NOT go into, but it does speak to a certain trend towards optimism and opportunism rather than self-flagellation.
And on the opposite end of the success spectrum, the idea of the masterpiece and how that word never felt like it pertained to us. Who decides and what are the characteristics of a masterpiece? It feels like the who is as important as the what.
While I don’t pretend to be an art historian, this idea of embracing artistic “failure” or as a metaphor for a counterculture rejection of mainstream society, is one we agreed we have maybe outgrown. With Gen Z leading the way, we have been invited as artists and as a society to no longer feel shame for the ways in which we do not meet the ridiculous expectations of late capitalism and its crumbling institutions. It is systems that have failed us as humans, not the other way around. And it seems like the best among us are no longer apologizing or shrinking ourselves as a result of these “shortcomings.” (One example of this that I love is The Nap Ministry which proposes to fight white supremacy with more rest.)
Among the slightly more contemporary examples of art embracing failure or deconstruction that we came up with were the Unmonumental sculpture show at the New Museum, provisional painting coined by Raphael Rubinstein, and Jerry Saltz’s zombie abstraction. There are most certainly newer examples.
What do you think? Have we, or is it even possible, to move beyond failure?