The Aesthetics of Failure and Crisis of Identity

The history of art has always been in crisis and artists have responded to this constant state of flux by trying to break the rules of current traditions, either with destructive or constructive methods. These crises are sometimes described as ‘fractures’ however in reality the process of change (retrospectively) is an organic transition. The modern world of business could be described in a similar fashion, markets appear quickly, there is a scramble to gain market position, the market disappears and the process starts all over again. This stuttering of continuity may be considered to be chaos but in reality it is a mirror on life itself…birth, life, death. This condition has been explored by artists, economists and scientists.

It is ingrained into our psyche from an early age that failure is a bad thing. From birth to death we are compared, or we compare ourselves, with people that have failed or succeeded. To be successful is to appear to our peers as socially, financially and intellectually superior. To fail is the complete opposite, to be ostracized by this successful society. Our preoccupation with success and its consequent obsession creates within us a crisis of identity. ‘Am I successful?’ ‘Do I appear to be successful?’ ‘Do my friends think I’m successful?’ Is it all just a facade, we have been  taken in by what we see and what we are being told.

Success and failure depends on circumstances and elements of chance, it also depends on your definition of success and failure. To be successful involves a considerable amount of risk and judgment. A successful individual relies on the principles of efficiency; success is that knife-edge that teeters between effectiveness and catastrophe. An understanding of failure is important and should be incorporated into a life business plan. Embracing failure is a useful tool for achieving goals, this measure of disorder is needed  in a system – this is entropy.

Robert Smithson, ironically, just before his accidental death, was involved with the processes of entropy within his ‘Land Art’ pieces. ‘In information theory you have another kind of entropy. The more information you have the higher degree of entropy, so that one piece of information tends to cancel out the other. The economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen¹ has gone so far as to say that the second law of thermodynamics is not only a physical law but linked to economics. He says, ‘Sadi Carnot could be called an econometrican. Pure science, like pure art tends to view abstraction as independent of nature, there’s no accounting for change or the temporality of the mundane world.’’²

Is this what is happening to the Internet? Is there too much information? Have we turned the internet into a mirror of our ‘mundane world’? Has it failed to comprehend the Aesthetics of Failure?