One thing you hear about the current economic mess is that some banks and companies are “too big to fail.” This is the idea that if a mega-corporation like AIG goes down, the repercussions are so enormous that other companies will fall in its wake and the whole financial system might fall apart. Thus an argument for tax-payer bailouts.
That got me thinking about the culture of failure. Science is built on failure. Make observations, posit solutions, try them out, fail, learn from your failure and try again until you find a solution. Scientific breakthroughs wouldn’t be possible without failure. Funding for research is predicated on extremely high rates of failure. Ask a successful person what they learned on the way up and they’ll likely talk about how they dealt with their failures, not their success.
The hippest, most interesting and successful arts programmer I ever knew told me once that the secret to his success was failure. “If more than 10 percent of the things I do are successful (he was, after all, a programmer of new work), I feel like I’m not doing my job,” he said. What he meant was that without trying many things that didn’t work, he couldn’t be open to the possibility of greatness. It was only his willingness to learn from mistakes and embrace failure that produced transcendent success.
Yet why does it so often seem that the goal of arts organizations is to neutralize failure or deny it? If AIG was “too big to fail” maybe it stopped learning from failure and found itself in trouble only after it was too late. In the 90s the arts economy expanded and many arts organizations got bigger and more institutional. With growth and soaring expenses, the cost of failing [read: the capacity to fail safely] often got priced out. And how many arts organizations, when they do do something that fails, rush to deny that it failed? Like admitting failure is a bad thing.
Arts funders have tended to want more and more assurances that the things they fund are successes. One manifestation of this trend is the way so much arts funding has become project-based. Funders prefer to have projects they can point to for tangible, measurable results.So it’s much easier to raise money for a new building than it is for operational support to keep the doors open. And it’s much easier to fund programs in multiculturalism or arts education than it is a new play or symphony.
As a result, we have a system set up to reward expansion of buildings and the building of infrastructure [a real estate bubble?] which then must be sustained in ways that make failure not an option. That is: guess wrong and you might put your organization in danger, so don’t guess wrong. And so we have arts organizations who are thought to be “too big to fail” even as they 1. get safer and safer in the artistic choices they make. and/or 2. get into bigger and bigger trouble because they can’t afford the little failures along the way that they could learn from.
The situation in the arts then, would seem to be exactly opposite of what we understand to be best practice in science. Funding for science is at a whole different level than funding for the arts, and yet, it seems to me that being good at funding the right kinds of failures in the arts might lead to a much healthier arts community.
What is worrying is that there are many trading, producing and presenting in today's art world who've never faced anything like the so-called "failure" of not selling art for years on end. There used to be a certain reserved dignity in the Guggenheim fellowship recipient who could not get a gallery to take his work seriously or the once prominent abstract expressionist who's work got "left behind"; they were part of the story of modern or contemporary art, salient inter generational narrators of artistic reality; ie its not all about who you know or which Long Island hamlet you chose for your vacation. It feels to me that we're in danger of forgetting how to lose commercially in cultural production; how to face an exhibition price list untainted by red dots, and the challenge for artists making less than saleable work, of sustaining a day job.
Truer words were never spoke. tt
"Funding for science is at a whole different level than funding for the arts" — well yes, funding for the arts in this country is much the larger of those. (The reverse claim would be true only if we counted government funding alone, which of course would be silly.)
You argue that the arts have become more risk-averse in recent decades, the same period during which all spending on the arts has increased so drastically; meanwhile science has avoided that syndrome while this society's real total spending on pure science has arguably declined or at best been flat. If correct, what does that hypothesis say about the effect of funding growth on willingness to risk failure?
How does economic security or lack thereof affect artists' relationship with their audiences? I'm reminded of Schnabel's movie about Basquiat–Schnabel suggests that ever since Van Gogh we've been doing penance by trying to rescue from obscurity. (With the sort of Schnabelesque insinuation that perhaps most of them don't deserve rescue.)
We do have a persistent notion that alienation of audience is the hallmark of artistic genius. So how are we defining "failure" exactly? Economic failure? Then most art produced by public funding indeed, fails. Aesthetic? Who judges this? Do the audience get to have a say?
TO PAUL: Are you seriously arguing that more is spent supporting the arts in this country than on science? Really? Adding up the American Heart Association, the myriad cancer foundations, drug companies, biotech research, Silicon Valley, industrial R&D, military science, the universities, etc, etc… You think that adds up to less than spending to support the arts?
You're right, though. I shouldn't make a generalization in a throwaway comment like that for which I don't have specific evidence, especially since it wasn't central to the point I was making.
As to your more important point – I'm not sure that I'm arguing that the arts generally have become more risk-averse in recent decades. I think there are many risk-takers out there. And funders who fund risk. The argument I was was trying to make (however clumsily) was that often funding incentives seem aligned against trying and failing. And that we often seem to believe in the arts that failure is a back-of-the-house issue that we don't talk about.
You make a correlation between risk and funding growth that suggests you think that the growth in arts funding in recent decades has not been a good thing. I'm not sure it's a bad thing; many more people participate in the arts (by whatever definition you use for "participate") in many more places across the country. As for science funding and risk – again, I wasn't making any funding arguments. My point was the narrow one that a culture of failing well in science was essential. In the arts it isn't.
I don't think linking economic failure to scientific failure is quite right, or even linking economic failure to failure in the arts, where experimentation is equally important. What I think is more apt, however, is to think about what happened on Broadway in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 — how New York City stepped in with a variety of modes of fiscal support for the commercial theatre industry, leaving Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, and the entire nonprofit sector, to fend for itself. And why? Because Michael Bloomberg deemed Broadway "too big to fail," or at least the late 2001 equivalent.
Failure is an ear-catching word and Samuel Beckett famously urges us to "Fail. Fail again; better." But the word does not really describe what happens. Artistic achievement–like scientific achievement–demands that the seeker know what does not work–or what is not needed–as well as what does work. So-called failure helps to show the path, either just the next step, or sometimes, entirely new ways of expression. Artists and scientists are doing exactly the same thing, it seems to me.
In response to the original post, I am just curious how the “most interesting and successful” arts programmer you know is able to support his 90% failure rate. As you astutely noted, the majority of funding these days (whether from private foundation or government organization) is strictly tied to performance–both artistic and financial. Perhaps now more than ever, funding organizations are watching with critical eye the every move your organization makes, careful not to throw money at a sinking ship. So if only 10% of someone’s efforts are “successful,” which made for a catchy line but perhaps could use definition, how do they exist in today’s real world? Budgetary cuts, board attrition, declining contributions are all systemic issues in the non-profit sector and success seems more highly demanded now than ever before. Or are you advocating for more for-profit endeavors?
TO MARTIN: He ran a small contemporary arts center, where the mission was to experiment. I should have added that the 10% estimation was just his, and he was speaking purely from an artistic point of view. He got big audiences. If you had talked to his audience or his board, they would have put the success rate as much higher, maybe even flipping the 90/10 split. Why? Because from the audience perspective, people loved participating in the aesthetic and they would pay to be there to be part of the experiments. It was usually not an unsuccessful experience in their eyes. From the board experience it was successful because there was lots of buzz and the audiences came.
My friend's estimation of his success rate was based on whether he was pushing into new territory in interesting ways. Repeating something just because it had worked the first time was not something he was interested in. He wanted to provoke reaction, and he felt he wasn't successful if he didn't get interesting reaction. That doesn't mean positive reaction, either.
My point was that here was someone who built a business model around failing a lot and that he found an audience that supported him.
TO LEONARD: I'm not quite sure what connection between scientific failure and economic failure you think I'm making. The "too-big-to-fail" argument we keep hearing about in the world of government bailouts is very different from the failures encouraged by scientific research. I think that we do have a sense that some/many arts organizations are too big/important to fail. Can you imagine New York City letting the Met (Opera or Museum) fail? Right now some of our most storied and revered arts institutions teeter on the brink – the Detroit Institute of Art, the Cleveland and Philadelphia Orchestras, just to name a few. It's hard to imagine them going out of business. Ditto other arts organizations across the country that are central to their communities.
TO DOUGLAS: "Are you seriously arguing that more is spent supporting the arts in this country than on science?" Well as you rightly point out we're both just hypothesizing on the point, but…yes, I do find that to be the most-likely fact. Two key pieces of logic influence that hypothesis:
(a) I take the word "funding" literally and treat money as fungible at the society-wide level. So when comparing how much "funding" any given broad subject is getting it seems to me intellectually dishonest to not count every form of funding, which in the case of the arts means not just foundation grants (which are a small fraction of arts-organization revenues) or government grants (even smaller) but also earned revenues (largest) and donations by individuals (next-largest). And those latter two are of course forms of funding which science gets hardly any of from our society.
(b) I also take the word "science" literally, distinguishing it from "technology." This is not simply a semantic point here because of the argument you made to start this exchange: that "Funding for research is predicated on extremely high rates of failure." That is true statement about scientific research; it is an absolutely false statement about technical R&D such as that funded by "drug companies, biotech research, Silicon Valley, industrial R&D, military." Those entities emphatically do not expect their R&D spending to result in failure and they are quite intolerant of it. E.g. no Silicon Valley company funded the _scientific_ research which, after many failures, eventually proved the core scientific breakthroughs that led to the digital revolution; rather, the corporate R&D departments seek to find the workable technological applications of such science, and in doing so they neither expect nor tolerate much failure. The places where actual science gets funded are the universities, cancer and other medical-oriented foundations, and some fraction of the pitiful federal science funding stream (unlike for the arts there is for science no such thing as state- or local-government funding) — a much smaller universe.
So yes, I'd happily bet a pair of tickets to the Lyric Opera on arts as receiving more funding in this society now than science. If for the comparison we include for-profit arts enterprises (and why should we not — are Broadway and other commercial theaters and music clubs and whatnot not presenting art? are the millions of people spending piles of money to attend those things not helping to support artists?) then the disparity gets even greater.
@Paul: Okay – if you’re going to add earned revenue, then you’ve got to add earned revenue from scientific investment. Which is huge. I disagree with your point about industrial research not being predicated on high failure rates. I don’t mean failure in the sense that they don’t want to be efficient about success. Of course they want success, and as cost-effectively as possible. But Amgen and Genentech and dozens of biotech companies have invested billions and decades in trying to create products, along the way engaging in basic science research. Ballard has invested hundreds of millions trying to develop efficient hydrogen-powered cars and there’s still no return yet. Pharmaceutical companies invest hundreds of millions in research and clinical trials which have high failure rates but the potential for stupendous reward.
Of course these companies don’t spend R&D to end in failure. But they have to work through the failures to get to the successes. That’s understood. And we shouldn’t count the massive returns the successes ultimately earn? Why not? My argument – and again, I have to say that it was a throwaway line I used to buttress another point, and levels of funding and comparative funding was emphatically not my main point – was about the approach to funding rather than the funding itself.