The Importance of Failure in An Artist's Creative Process

In a creative process, ideas get thrown about and refined until it takes on a more definite shape and finally, settles into its final form. But throughout that process, there will be instances when things won't work out exactly as planned.

The initial stages of any creator's work are usually fraught with failures or areas in which ideas could still improve and even after that stage, circumstances may dictate a different outcome. A project may not push through or come out as expected.

But artists should be given leeway to have these failures. These don't necessarily mean it's the end of the creative process rather it could be a stepping stone to make the idea into something better. This allows artists to take a step back and look at their work from a different perspective and take another direction that could be more beneficial for the work in the end.

So, what’s the worst that could happen if individuals and institutions started funding the roughest sketches of an artist’s idea? The fear from our market-driven culture is that the piece never comes to fruition and “fails.” However, we have seen great examples of this in very public forums. What looks like a failure is often just the beginning of something else, often something more interesting.

(Image credit: Trevor Paglen/Nevada Museum of Art)