One More Thing about Failure

Although it does not happen so much any more, I used to get asked to jury art shows. This is sometimes sort of nice - you get to see the pieces before they are installed and often have plenty of time to yourself in the gallery, before it is open to the public.

The horrible thing is having to eliminate pieces from the show. I find this unbelievably painful. Everyone who has sent a piece of work to a show secretly believes that the piece they submitted is a seminal, important work - a piece that will engage the public in some way and confirm their hopes that they have some talent. Often, they pay a fee to submit work to a show. Rejecting those pieces is an awful duty - so awful that every time I have had to do it, I have sworn I would never do it again. But I always do do it again, and feel awful each time.

Part of the guilt is this: these people have at least finished something. I feel like I never finish anything and I sometimes admire anyone who does finish a project, regardless of its quality.

I also worry that the rejection will erroneously convince the artist that he or she has no talent. What a tragedy that would be; I have every confidence that I am capable of missing a masterpiece that was simply ahead of its time. With that in mind, I wrote the following introduction to my juror's remarks for a show I judged in Fredericksburg last winter. If I am ever asked to be a juror for anything again, I will recycle this, because it is my signature line on what it means to be eliminated from a show:

"Fragments"

Fredericksburg Center for the Creative Arts

7 March 2008

Juror’s Statement

Looking at art is a joy. I believe this is a sentiment that everyone in this room shares. To get to look at art and be asked to share what you think about it is a profound honor. Thank you very much for that privilege.

It is also a responsibility. Eliminating works from an exhibition is the most odious part of jurying an exhibition. If you or someone you know is an artist whose work was not selected for this show, I would like to say this: Congratulations.

You have joined the ranks of Gustave Courbet, Honore Daumier, Edouard Manet, James McNeil Whistler, and almost the entire art history canon, many of whose greatest members were also the most rejected. Some of those rejections were the result of taking a creative risk that did not work. Some were the result of not taking a risk when one should have. And a great many were risk-fueled flashes of brilliance that pushed an art form to a realm of expression that society would spend years catching up with.

What those artists had in common, and what artists today need even more than artists in the past did, is a belief in their own vision -- a passion for their art that is too strong to be silenced by an outsider’s assessment. So more than anything else, I hope that every artist who has created a work that was rejected (this is really just another way of saying “every artist”) went immediately, and defiantly, back into the studio. Your soul – and a weary world desperately in need of art, ideas, and expression – is waiting.