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Symposium: Failed! The Sociological Analysis of Failure – peer-reviewed
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/18337
Sociologica. V.17 N.3 (2023)
ISSN 1971-8853
Kaleidoscopic Failure: The Regularity, Repetition,
and Patterning of Failure in the Arts
Rachel Skaggs*
Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy, The Ohio State University (United States)
Submitted: October 27, 2023 – Revised version: January 10, 2024
Accepted: January 11, 2024 – Published: March 12, 2024
Abstract
This essay presents the argument that failure in the arts is kaleidoscopic, presenting myriad
points and types of regular, repeated, patterned failures that are concealed by focusing on
nancial earnings as the primary way that failure is experienced by artists. This framework
is useful as a way to examine and review knowledge about the arts through outlining how
individuals, groups, artistic products, and ideas can fail to accumulate economic, human,
social, and cultural capital.
Keywords: Failure; Artistic careers; Capital acquisition; Culture; Non-standard work.
*skaggs.131@osu.edu
Copyright © 2023 Rachel Skaggs
The text in this work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
99
Kaleidoscopic Failure Sociologica. V.17 N.3 (2023)
While sociologists of culture have often focused on elite artists, successful cultural produc-
ers, and celebrated cultural objects as the object of inquiry, the modal artist and the modal
artwork are failures by most measures. Resulting theories of cultural production focus on rare
events, non-normative experiences, and exemplary objects, leading to a decit in understand-
ing and theorizing artistic failures. Within the arts, culture, and creativity, failure is possible at
every point from an idea’s genesis to its creation, production, and reception. Art works can fail
to communicate the artist’s idea, sculptures can crumble, creative partnerships can erupt into
rivalry, and massive, expensive failures can happen when a big budget movie ops at the box
oce or is panned by critics.
Anecdotal orthodoxies about failure in the arts are well known. These ideas about the arts
as sites of frequent, severe failure form the setup for joke punch lines, push parents to dissuade
their children from becoming artists, and discourage investment in the arts from public and
private sources alike.1Popular perceptions of artists as uniquely subject to high levels of failure
are centered primarily in understanding failure in the arts as the inability to earn a steady and
sucient salary to make a living and partially in the general public’s unfamiliarity with the
conventions and purpose of non-commercial contemporary art. The trope of the starving artist
is well known, coloring perceptions of artistic careers and necessitating signicant PR eorts by
non-prot groups and universities who wish to promote the value of the arts and of artists in
society. Though the trope of the starving artist focuses on failure to generate sucient material
earnings, I argue that failure in the arts is kaleidoscopic, presenting myriad points and types of
regular, repeated, patterned failures that are concealed by focusing on nancial earnings as the
primary way that failure is experienced by artists. Failure is a normal reality in the arts, yet it is
felt individually and can lead artists to self-doubt, low motivation, blocks in creativity, or exiting
the eld altogether (Gonithellis, 2018). Even if felt exceptionally and individually, failure in the
arts is normal and widespread.
While status acquisition can appear to be a binary measure failure or success in the winner-
takes-all art worlds, the nature and context of creative work and cultural production as collective
action (Becker, 2008) introduces thousands of points of potential for failure along a number
of relevant dimensions. That is to say that failure is a normal experience that is repeated in
day-to-day ways and more exceptional ways for all artistic creators and for the things that they
create. While economic capital is the simplest to proxy or measure in creative work, capital is
fungible and creative workers regularly earn and exchange a variety of capitals to create and to
connect their creations to audiences or clients (Childress, 2017; Frenette, 2019; Hesmondhalgh
& Baker, 2010; Scott, 2012). Toward understanding failure in the arts within a framework of
capital non-acquisition, I discuss how the failure to accumulate or exchange various forms of
capital is regular, repeated, and patterned in the arts.
When I say “arts”, I mean it in the most inclusive sense, as a shorthand for all arts, cultural,
and creative arenas, elds, industries, and markets, encompassing the people, groups, collec-
tives, and organizations who create, produce, curate, administer, and teach within these realms,
as well as the works and products that emerge from their collective action. This heterogenous
conception of the arts is reected in sociological theorizing about art worlds (Becker, 2008;
Corneld, 2015; Corte et al., 2019; Godart et al., 2020; Lena, 2021; Lingo & Tepper, 2013;
Menger, 2001; Skaggs & Aparicio, 2023), as well as in arts and cultural policy as it attempts
1. For example, beyond memes and jokes about artists being unable to nancially support themselves, Frenette
and Dowd (2020) motivate their report about who stays and who leaves careers the arts after earning a col-
lege degree in an artistic major by quoting a speech made by U.S. president Barack Obama lauding technical
training and calling out an art history degree as potentially less monetarily valuable.
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Kaleidoscopic Failure Sociologica. V.17 N.3 (2023)
to account for an expanded understanding of arts, cultural, and creative life (National Endow-
ment for the Arts, 2019; Novak-Leonard et al., 2021; Tepper & Ivey, 2008). Given the com-
plexity and diversity of art worlds, a theory of artistic failure requires a broad, exible approach
to understanding many reasons for, locations of, and ways that failure can occur.
In order to specify this framework across such an unwieldy category, I limit this article to
understanding failure among artistic creators and works of art, as they relate to their artistic cre-
ators, though similar principles could be discussed to understand failure of artistic movements,
of organizations, or of events. With many types of art and many pathways to success, there are
many ways to fail within art worlds. Artists and creative workers themselves are exceptionally
varied in terms of their skills, roles, education, social identities, aims, and earnings. They, and
the work that they do, are incredibly diverse despite being collected into the same occupational
group (Lena & Lindemann, 2014; Skaggs & Aparicio, 2023). Some kinds of artists will defy
all generalities in this text; however, this is an attempt to conceptualize the commonalities of
failure that characterize aspects of artistic or creative work that are characteristic of all artists at
some point in their personal artistic process or their career.
Within the unwieldy boundaries and array of organizing structures that contain the arts
and creative elds, failure is regular, repeated, and patterned, like the image that one sees when
peering into a kaleidoscope. It is regular in that everyone who participates in the arts experi-
ences failure as a routine feature of the endeavor. It is repeated in that failure is not binary,
rather it happens multiple times to everyone. It is patterned in that it occurs and accumulates
in expected ways according to the context in which it unfolds. The regular, repeated patterning
of failure in the arts could be examined in numerous ways. For instance, invoking a dierent
theoretical metaphor of a kaleidoscope, the term has been used in management scholarship,
positioning the kaleidoscope as a subjectivist approach against the realist metaphor of a lens
used to understand patterns of interpretation of social phenomena (Nord & Connell, 1993).
However, the approach employed herein is based on a framework of normal, patterned failure
in capital accumulation and exchange. This discussion is intended as a way to examine and re-
view knowledge about the arts through outlining how individuals, artistic products, and ideas
can fail to accumulate or exchange economic, human, social, and cultural capital. The resulting
framework gives leverage for studying failure as regular, repeated, and patterned, and provides a
synthesis of knowledge about the sociology of art focused on the importance of understanding
failure to pair with the eld’s well-honed understanding of success.
1 Failure Is Regular: The Individual Experience
The work of art requires risk — creativity itself is an activity that generates something novel
and useful (Amabile et al., 2018). There are numerous debates about the meaning of creativity
and its connection to art, but according to this measure, any work intended to be creative that
does not meet this bar is a failure. So even the most economically successful artist will have ex-
periences at some point when a musical note does not land, when paint drips before it dries, or
when a design is rejected by a client. Every artist experiences failure, so it is a routine aspect of ac-
tivity in this eld. Failure is rarely terminal, and all artists have to contend with failure, whether
the failure is borne in the process of creation (e.g., an object or idea fails to meet specications
or realize the creative idea) or in the elds of production or reception (e.g., the artist does not
like her work, an editor rejects a writer’s draft, or an audience chooses to listen to someone else’s
song, making a singer’s single a relative failure).
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Despite the routine, normal nature of failure, individual artists have to learn to contend
with failure. Artistic labor markets face a perpetual oversupply of workers (Menger, 1999), and
there are more artistic and creative works than can be supported (Hirsch, 1972), meaning that
individuals and their work in the arts exist in a highly competitive space where failure is normal.
In a clinical guide for psychological counseling for artists, rejection and failure show up over
80 times,2and recommendations in this book encourage counselors to understand that even
the most talented or gifted artists have self-doubt and need interventions to build creative con-
dence (Gonithellis, 2018). Outside of a therapeutic or counseling setting, occupational com-
munities that surround artists, including mentorship, friendship relationships, and participa-
tion in the normal activities of an art world help individuals to understand the regular, normal
character of failure in their particular artistic context (Craig & Dubois, 2010; Frenette, 2013;
Fürst, 2016; Reilly, 2018; Skaggs, 2019). Though all artists experience failure, understanding
it as a normal reality of their eld is important, taking individual self-doubt and exchanging it
for an understanding of how art worlds work.
2 Failure Is Repeated: Opportunities and Markets
In addition to failure being regular, routinely experienced by all, it is also repeated such that any
one individual will certainly fail on one measure or another many times.3However, past success
does not protect artists from failing or failing again, and most artists who gain a high level of
success for one work will not do so again (Fürst, 2022, 2023), meaning that while success is
rare, a career based on repeated success is rarer. This repetition of failure leads some scholars
to focus on pathways or trajectories (Corneld, 2015; Fürst, 2023; Wohl, 2019) and some on
resilience (Lindemann, 2013; Wong et al., 2021) as key factors in understanding artistic careers.
Dealing with economic and symbolic markets creates much of the repetition of failure in the
arts. Across artistic, cultural, and creative elds, market uncertainties mean that individuals
contend with the risk and opportunity of sharing their work with the market (Godart et al.,
2014; Mears, 2011; Rossman, 2012; van Venrooij & Schmutz, 2018). In addition to the market
being dicult for any single artist at any one time, the nature of careers and aging in the arts
means that for many, even early success and cultivating an established career will fade as new
entrants who reect market preferences for youth, novelty, and new artistic movements unseat
incumbents (Accominotti, 2009; Frenette, 2019; Mears, 2011; Skaggs, 2022). Even in artistic
elds that value status over economic success, the market for new ideas and symbolic capital is
constraining, with adherence to one’s own past artistic trajectory (Wohl, 2019, 2021) and its
overlap with the community sense of the group (Wohl, 2015) structuring the stakes for who
and what fails, even after attaining membership in the group and some level of initial success.
The fragmentation and long tails of markets in the contemporary era means that just as
something can be perceived as a failure when released to the public, it can still rise from obscu-
rity or maintain slow and steady sales or acceptance by audiences, critics, or inuence groups
of artists over time and in specic niches (Anderson, 2006; Hirsch, 2000). Just because the
digital era makes this eminently feasible does not mean that it was not also a feature of artis-
tic careers and the trajectories of artistic work in the past. For instance, posthumous success is
documented and theorized across many artistic disciplines (Lang & Lang, 1988; Parler, 2020).
2. “reject*” – 55; “fail*” – 30.
3. Though successful people generally are more able to cultivate a good reputation and attract more resources
that lead to a higher likelihood of continued success (Menger, 2014; Merton, 1968).
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In this way, it is important to remember that failure is not nal for artistic works or for artistic
careers in terms of their legacy, legitimation, or value over time.
3 Failure Is Patterned: Structured Inequalities
Were failure to be unidimensional, it might stop an individual from continuing in the arts, and
repeated failure would increase this likelihood. However, failure in the arts is multidimensional,
with the potential to impact an artist or creative worker at many dierent phases of the creative
process and on many scalar levels. Though potential failure is multidimensional, it is not, for
the most part, random. People and the art they make fail in more-or-less predictable ways, pat-
terned according to the conventions of particular art worlds, labor markets, and social worlds.
The patterns that emerge and persist relating to failure in the arts could be conceptualized in a
number of ways, including, according to particularities of the symbolic and material creation
of artistic or creative work (Becker, 2008; Lena, 2012; Peterson & Berger, 1975; Wohl, 2021),
according to relevant labor market dynamics (Corneld, 2015; Frenette et al., 2018; Hénaut
et al., 2023; Lingo & Tepper, 2013; Peterson & Anand, 2004), and importantly, along pre-
dictable dimensions of structural inequality in which people and which art are discriminated
against (Childress & Nault, 2019; Chong, 2011; Dowd & Park, 2023; Garbes, 2022; Gualtieri,
2021).
When considering the patterning of failure in the arts, understanding acquisition and ex-
change of capital is a useful strategy for understanding failure. Patterns of success have been
examined in terms of artists and their works’ accumulation and exchange of economic, human,
social, and cultural capital, and the reciprocal ndings embedded in studies of successful artists
and art outline failure as the non-acquisition of or inability to exchange these capitals in relation
to the arts. Sociological generalities about capital acquisition and maintenance generally hold
in this context.4That is, people who have access to more and more valued capital generally are
more successful. What is more, in the arts, the fungibility of capital, its ability to be transferred
and exchanged for other types of capital, give insight into a reason that failure is not terminal
for an artist or their work.
Self-structuring, multiple jobholding, and polyoccupationalism all characterize artists’ abil-
ities to obtain and exchange various forms of capital in the work that they do, even if they fail
at obtaining other forms of capital (Ashton, 2015; Hénaut et al., 2023; Platman, 2004; Scott,
2012; Stokes, 2021; Wyszomirski & Chang, 2017). Artists frequently hold multiple types of
roles, contracts, and jobs that make up the whole of their work and creative life, some of which
may have relatively high earning potential in terms of one or more types of capital, whether it be
economic, human, social, or cultural capital. For example, one visual artist may hold contract
work in graphic design for a local publishing company that pays relatively well (economic) but
that is highly commercial and does not publicly attribute her work. Simultaneously, she may
have the opportunity to be in a selective artists’ residency (cultural) where she can continue to
develop her skills in intaglio (human) and connect with other artists in her eld (social) despite
not being paid for her time in the residency. Such occupational careers are structured around
and can perpetuate unstable and low earnings relative to other similarly skilled workers (Abreu
et al., 2012; Menger, 2006) since eorts may be focused on accumulating non-economic capi-
tals, even as rare “superstars” earn incredibly high incomes across artistic disciplines (e.g., Ala-
4. As such, this section does not focus on dening forms of capital in the arts, but rather outlines themes related
to failure of acquiring and exchanging these forms of capital.
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covska & Bille, 2021). Having such an amalgamation of occupational roles and sources of work,
including self-driven projects and eorts, means that regular, repeated, patterned failure is not
lethal to a creative career. The risky, failure-fraught nature of artistic work has been met by a
21st century style of work that allows for persistence even amidst failure.
Even given the economic and occupational challenges in the arts, artists and creative work-
ers are able to persist and achieve in part due to their ability to acquire and exchange other types
of capital (Alacovska, 2022; Scott, 2012). The ability to exchange capital in appropriate ways
is highly specic to the context of particular art worlds. In the case of the graphic designer in
the intaglio artists’ residency given above, this artist’s connection to the residency and the skills
that she learned may lead to paid opportunities, like teaching at the residency, or to opportuni-
ties to sell the work using the skills that she gained at the residency. Even if she fails to be hired
for subsequent graphic design contracts, she may be able to parlay the new skills and connec-
tions into new opportunities for paid work. Despite derision and stereotyping of artists who
do low-paying work outside of their artistic practice to make ends meet, some artists choose
to take so-called “bad jobs” as a commitment device that strengthens their identity as an artist
(Adler, 2020). Adler’s research inverts the contemporary popular assumption that artists who
are moonlighting in service roles are failed artists. Evaluation is somewhat subjective but so-
cially structured (Aadland et al., 2020; Sgourev & Althuizen, 2017), with artistic communities
crafting their own standards of taste (Wohl, 2015) that dier between artistic elds and often
between eld insiders and outsiders (Bourdieu, 1983), and thus failure to obtain economic cap-
ital may be an asset for some artists should their eld place higher value on cultural capital.
The value of traditional higher education in the arts, a major source of human capital, is
contested. Research shows that across many majors, there are skills gaps in what graduates of
arts programs learn in their degree program and what they need for their careers (Skaggs et al.,
2017) and that in recent cohorts impacted by the Great Recession arts degree holders earn less
than their pre-recession arts graduate peers (Paulsen, 2021). In higher education, research, phil-
anthropic, and practitioner circles, arts entrepreneurship has over the past decade become a
leading framework for describing and addressing the conditions of precarity that shape individ-
ual careers in the arts (Chang & Wyszomirski, 2015), positioning human capital in the form of
skills, risk-taking behaviors, and opportunity seeking as ways to circumvent failure. In a neolib-
eral, capitalist political economy, considering the artist or creative worker to be an entrepreneur
whose vocation necessarily requires that she take on risk aligns artistic work with models that
are familiar and understandable to a wider public.5Economic precarity is a motivator for self-
identifying as an arts entrepreneur (Feder & Woronkowicz, 2022), and artists who are not able
to obtain the necessary human capital to self-structure careers are especially likely to experience
more failure in the contemporary era, despite talent or special artistic abilities.
What of those artists who do fail to continue on in arts work? While much of the research
cited here focuses on artists whose creative work and occupational roles are at the fore, even
those individuals who fail in an artistic career path or never pursue the arts as a career may still
engage in the arts in other ways, such as a hobby, as a volunteer in the arts, by participating in
local arts programs, or being a fan of art (Frenette & Dowd, 2020; Lindemann, 2013; Skaggs
et al., 2017). Again, failure is not terminal, and non-occupational pathways exist to creating
or performing art, though these pathways generally lack legitimation within occupational com-
munities of artists (e.g., as in self-publishing books: Fürst, 2019). However, it stands that the
winner-take-all markets across the arts are rife with failure. Artists appear to personalize the risk,
5. Compared to, say, models that present the artist as a needy individual whose work is created from a patronage
relationship or as an employee whose labor is governed by an employer or employing organization.
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precarity, and uncertainty of their elds, thinking of success (and failure) as due to luck (or bad
luck) (Lindström, 2018) and putting up with negative aspects of the work because of their pas-
sion (Frenette, 2016), despite the fact that such feelings can lead to work-related exploitation
and further disappointment upon failure (Cech, 2021).
4 Conclusion
This article forwards the concept of kaleidoscopic failure as regular, repeated, patterned capital
non-acquisition toward contributing to a sociological perspective on failure in the arts. Failure
should not be understood in the arts as having a moral valence; people who fail and art that fails
are not necessarily bad. Likewise, artists and art that are cast as successful are not necessarily
good. Thinking of failures only as individual happenings that occur in the lives and work of
individual people neglects sociological knowledge and theory about the importance and impact
of collectives, communities, and interactions in art worlds. Despite being part of a structure
that casts failure as regular, repeated, and patterned, individuals in the system are often seen
themselves as failures, an ascribed term with moral implications that can be dicult for their
self-esteem, make them question their artistic voice, and many times make them choose to leave
the arts altogether.
Sociologists often conceptualize the determinants of failure in the arts implicitly from stud-
ies of successes in art worldsand studies of elite artists and their work, so much is lost in the im-
plied ndings about failure in the arts. Sampling on success means that the “failures” in many of
these studies are objectively successful on many other measures. For instance, even those who
were not the most creative in their time were still far more successful than artists whose cre-
ativity was not documented in art historical writing (Accominotti, 2009). Misaligned missions
between grantees and a granting agency cannot document such alignment or misalignment
from unsuccessful grant proposals (Crisman, 2022), and understanding predictors of success
among lms in the exhaustive Internet Movie Database (IMDB) still only considers lms that
were completed and distributed in a way that allowed them to be documented by IMDB (Lut-
ter, 2015; Rossman et al., 2010). What is more, empirical realities within the arts are sometimes
not considered or are excluded from analyses, often because they fall outside of the theoretical
contribution of articles that are focused on success or on specically delineated types of success.
These are understandable, given limitations of analytic software and the push for parsimony in
theoretical and empirical models. In fact, many authors note this bias toward the known and
lament that they cannot access data about artists and art that have failed in a more systematic
way without implicitly sampling for some degree of success.
Likewise in qualitative studies of the arts, relative failures are discussed by interviewees who
have been identied as relevant to the artistic eld and eld sites are selected for their appro-
priateness in studying the arts, meaning that the people, thoughts, behaviors, processes, and
actions captured in these data are likely to be disproportionately aligned with success or success-
seeking. It would be dicult to select for failure, and to be sure, there are empirical and the-
oretical diculties in dealing with and theorizing failures, particularly when failure is normal
and success is rare for the modal artists and their work.
Many sociologists of art and of artistic careers have interest in and have set out to study
failure, but conventional sampling methods and timelines for expedient completion of disser-
tations, books, tenure and promotion periods, and grants hinder scholars looking to identify
and understand failures. Things have to be known to be studied, so obscurity is inherently lim-
iting to empirical study in this area. Studying artistic failures could begin from sampling works
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in progress longitudinally rather than choosing an object of analysis retrospectively. Likewise,
whereas ranked lists of artists and their successful works are easily accessed (e.g., Oscar win-
ners, Billboard chart toppers, New York Times Best Sellers, Models who walk in Paris Fashion
Week haute couture shows), comprehensive lists like copyright databases, IMDB, YouTube and
Spotify uploads, and other digital platforms and archives may give creative sociologists ways to
access everyday artists and their work before they become successful or fail, though many chal-
lenges arise in understanding failed works when thinking through what is published or posted
online in the rst place. In these cases, retrospective interview or oral history analyses of “suc-
cessful” and “failed” artists alongside data about their work, creative lives, and goals throughout
their careers may provide useful data for deeper theorizing.
Cultural economists have been publishing research for over two decades using national data
sets in the United States like the Current Population Survey (Alper & Wassall, 2000; Feder
& Woronkowicz, 2022; Woronkowicz, 2015) and the American Community Survey (Paulsen,
2021; Wassall & Alper, 2018; Woronkowicz, 2023) to examine the career outcomes of artists.
The questions that can be answered with these data are limited according to the questions that
appear on these national surveys, and it is worth noting that this trajectory, too, is primarily fo-
cused on determinants of success. Nevertheless, these data do provide a more robust sample of
potential failure rather than sampling on success in the same ways as are common in sociological
research.
This conceptualization of failure in the arts as kaleidoscopic is only one perspective. It treats
art worlds somewhat erroneously as the sum of individual parts in terms of the structures of fail-
ure and the points of failure that individuals experience. For instance, meso-level social groups,
including organizations, are not theorized here. Variation makes patterns interesting, and the
variation across artistic disciplines, creative media, and the careers of the people who hold these
roles make the arts a fascinating case for understanding structures and processes of failure in
social life, in and beyond the arts. However, this variation makes it dicult to conceptualize
any theory that whollyaccounts for anything in the arts. For this reason, understanding failure
as kaleidoscopic in its regularity, repetition, and patterning is broad enough to constitute a con-
cept of artistic failure that is sensitive to failure as being normal but also subject to the context
of art world particularities.
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Rachel Skaggs –Department of Arts Administration, Education, and Policy, The Ohio State Uni-
versity (United States)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1041-8780 |skaggs.131@osu.edu
https://www.rachelskaggs.me/
Rachel Skaggs holds the Lawrence and Isabel Barnett Professorship of Arts Management as Assistant
Professor at The Ohio State University (United States). She is a sociologist of culture and work whose
research focuses on relational ecosystems in creative industries. Her recent research can be found in Po-
etics, Work and Occupations,Social Psychology Quarterly, and The Journal of Arts Management, Law,
and Society.
https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/18337 112
