18 ms·

Artists must be allowed to make bad work

240 points by open-source-ux 3y ago

meristohm 3y ago
Scientists, too. Anyone, really; fail faster, people! Celebrate the process of trial and error.
- mantas 3y ago
  Engineers and doctors and nurses... Eh... Maybe not so fast...
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    Possibly yes, but on emulators/training data/virtual patients. One of the advantages of today's digital world is that you don't have to jump to the real thing immediately. Come to think of it, maybe even laws should be tested in a laboratory first. We cannot emulate the human society fully, but some unwanted effects could be detected this way anyway.
    - mantas 3y ago
      It's easy to find issues in laws with some brainstorming over a pizza. The problem is people pushing certain laws frequently don't give a damn about side effects. Why would they care about results coming out from a simulation?
      - inglor_cz 3y ago
        It is easy to find theoretical issues through brainstorming, but weeding out the false positives is much less easy. As an example, religious conservatives will brainstorm a lot of issues that are bound to rise (according to them) from gay emancipation. In practice, these failed to manifest.
        mantas 3y ago
        You can easily manipulate results in a lab test too by messing with the environment and cherry picking results. And focusing on different outcomes. I'm pretty sure same religious conservatives will claim that issues they saw did come up. While the other extreme would just shrug off the same issues as non-issue. Different people value different things... More at 11.
  - wongarsu 3y ago
    Maybe the statement could be refined to "must be given opportunity for failure". For some professions that might include running some projects at a smaller scale, as a simulation or even as role play exercise
  - evandijk70 3y ago
    For doctors looking to innovate, there are actually a lot of ways to fail fast and safely if you introduce a new drug. First, establish that a drug binds to the target in laboratory conditions (relatively quick). After that, test the drug in an animal model. After that, proceed to clinical trials, which are phased (phase I, II, III) to first establish whether a dosage exists that is safe (Phase I), what an effective dosage is (Phase II), and only after than testing if it improves upon the current standard of care (Phase III). Each phase is more costly (both in time and money) than the previous phase and will eliminate a significant portion of drug candidates. "The success rate of each drug discovery stage in academia was 31.8% for preclinical, 75.1% for phase I, 50.0% for phase II, 58.6% for phase III." [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24406927/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24406927/
    - dahart 3y ago
      Doctors? This sounds more like the activity of a Pharmaceutical company?
  - mordae 3y ago
    Even those. When the cost of failure is too high, we need to invest in practices that allow them fail safely. And get as much from failures as possible. It means giving doctors and nurses simulators, someone to look over their shoulder when learning new techniques, giving them high-quality followup data, finding top performers and make them explain what they do and so on. Which is currently very hard to do, because teaching others means you lose your advantage. It also means learning from failures of others. That means writing about the fuckups and telling them. Which is currently almost impossible to do, because admitting failure can often result in an end to your career. And all of this is exacerbated with consolidated, privatized healthcare where the shots are called not by outcome-oriented caregivers, but by profit-oriented MBAs.
  - taopai 3y ago
    My grandfather, a photographer, told me this story: 20 years ago in a doctor's graduation ceremony held somewhere in Spain the old doctor who gave the speech told the graduates: "Now your job is to kill people. Along the years you'll learn, and if you are good, you'll kill less people and save some."
- barberpole 3y ago
  > trial and error There's a clip of John Cleese showing how Beethoven in fact composed the 5th symphony by trial and error.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    I would very much like to see that if you have a link. Google search doesn't find it for me.
    - gcmrtc 3y ago
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wYwB3lJAbYY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wYwB3lJAbYY
- afpx 3y ago
  Too bad scientists don't publish their failures
alentred 3y ago
I truly think of science and engineering, software development included, as an artistic feat in part. And we can easily see how the opinion expressed in this interview easily applies to what we do. Yes, we all have periods where we should be allowed to do bad work, learn on it and eventually come out with better ideas. Yes, the "public" pressure and the focus on novelty is there (right now on HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336). P.S. I have just realized that I have the "Steal Like An Artist" by Austin Kleon in my library. Proves the point of being an artist I guess :D
- mlok 3y ago
  Maybe the proper word is "creative" and not "artistic" ? Both have an exploration/experimental side in common.
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
  My thoughts exactly. OKR- and measurement-based management -- so ubiquitous as to be almost synonymous with "management" -- seem to accelerate certain short-term movement, at the cost of stagnation in the long term. Punctuated equilibrium is replaced by a whirling vortex.
- eropple 3y ago
  ?> Yes, we all have periods where we should be allowed to do bad work, learn on it and eventually come out with better ideas. Most people's GitHub pages are full of this kind of junk. And in this case, "junk" is absolutely not a pejorative. It's necessary, and it can show growth if somebody's looking for it.
js8 3y ago
That's the free market pressure. The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. And it is by many believed to be a good thing, because it's very meritocratic. But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market (not even the one that works in liberal theory and is perfectly meritocratic). It was also one of the justifications behind copyright, to give artists more stability.
- lucozade 3y ago
  > The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. That's blatantly not true in art, if it's true at all. If the art market agrees that some random sketch was by Da Vinci, it's not valued on merit.
  - anshorei 3y ago
    A lot of that value is in the aspect of the sketch as a historical artifact. There's little present performance to speak of when it comes to Da Vinci.
    - lucozade 3y ago
      That's simply not true. Almost all the value will be because it's attributed to da Vinci. You simply won't get the same valuation if it's attributed to a lesser known contemporary. And you don't need to go historical. I just picked da Vinci as an example. If you or I made a balloon dog sculpture, it won't be valued the same as a Jeff Koons one [0]. Even if it's essentially identical. There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object. [0] I'm assuming you're not Jeff Koons. The problem with HN is that, sometimes, you are actually chatting to a celebrity in the field without knowing.
      - lou1306 3y ago
        Well, the balloon dog example simply boils down to the fact that your work will only be seen as a rip-off. > There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object. Subset? I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning. Duchamp's urinal neatly exemplifies this.
markusstrasser 3y ago
he's been following his own advice religiously for years
amelius 3y ago
Yes, even Leonardo da Vinci made some very bad stuff.
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
"Must be allowed to” sounds like a weasel word. It is not illegal to make bad work. I doubt any contract an artist signs usually has a clause against producing bad work either. That phrase may sound sophisticated and provocative but it means nothing, at least to me.
- dghf 3y ago
  It seems pretty clear to me, especially with the context provided in the article itself: don't judge an artist solely by the last thing they made; don't write them off just because they're going through a bad patch.
  - awestroke 3y ago
    People must be allowed to judge and write off artists solely based on the last thing they made
    - nabla9 3y ago
      People are reading this text in two ways: 1) A suggestion is made for the readers and to the society to change how the judge and think about artists. 2) Writers tries to convey new norms, forbid judgement. What do you think the writer tried to do here?
    - User2000 3y ago
      It is preferable to take a more nuanced approach to judging artists, looking at their entire career and recognizing the inherent subjectivity of artistic appreciation, but people have a perfect right to judge an artist on a work of art, it simply shows a certain closed-mindedness
  - falcolas 3y ago
    At the same time, artists of every kind have to contend with the fact that this is currently a golden age for art. We are confronted with more art of every kind than we could ever consume. The cost for moving on has never been lower. So while an artist should be allowed to have down periods, it also shouldn't be surprising if people move on. We're not looking for needles in haystacks anymore, we're looking for needles in a stack of needles. There may be value in coveting needles and hay from a particular artist, but that's an intensely personal decision to make.
j7ake 3y ago
In science the analogy is : “yeah this person did good work five years ago, but what have they done recently?” as a way to reject people for jobs, grants, and promotions.
hathym 3y ago
who told you they are not? https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-explained-maurizio-cattelan https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-ex...
ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
There’s even a museum for them: https://museumofbadart.org/ https://museumofbadart.org/
- antupis 3y ago
  Execution is lagging here it would be more fruitful if we would see Vince Van Gogh or Pablo Picasso bad work rather than just some noname artists.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    Yeah, I know. It was just a joke.
- Finnucane 3y ago
  Oh no, they've moved out of their gallery at the Somerville Theater. I mean, that's not a tragedy, just less convenient for me personally.
noam_compsci 3y ago
It depends on both the hit rate (success / attempts), the churn rate (length of time a success is successful for) and finally the output rate (length of time it takes do one attempt).
nikanj 3y ago
But must they be paid for bad work?
- fullshark 3y ago
  And everyone needs to pretend it's good so their feelings don't get hurt?
qup 3y ago
They funded vice with like a billion dollars, right? We're not just allowing it, we're actively encouraging it.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
Actually this applies to humans in general. One of my pet peeves is artists (and journalists) setting themselves apart as a “high priesthood” and claiming things for themselves specially which should apply to humans in general. Yes, artists should be allowed to make bad work and go through bad times because humans must be allowed to make bad work and go through bad times. Yes, creativity and freedom is important for artists because creativity and freedom is important for all humans. Yes the government should not be spying on journalists, because it shouldn’t be spying on people in general.
ivan_gammel 3y ago
Social pressure is not higher now than in the other periods, when art could be called degenerate or heresy. Newspapers were influential and before them it was church and favoritism in the high society. Van Gogh, Mark Rothko and many others were not happy people who enjoyed a lot of support from the public. We do not know the names of artists from earlier periods who vanished because they were not understood. Suffering is the fuel of art. Take your broken heart and make it into art - that’s how it works. If the pressure of social media is painful, you cannot do anything with it, so either you create or find something else to do, as it has always been.
tyingq 3y ago
It's difficult for me to reason this sort of thing. Success, or even just being able to scrape out a living from art seems like a lottery. That is, there's not really any strong correlation between talent, effort and success. Plenty of starving, yet talented and/or hard-working artists. And plenty of successful artists with less talent or effort than their starving peers. So in this case, pushing for an environment that allows for bad periods is really only trying to improve things for those that won that initial lottery.
- velavar 3y ago
  Something that blew my mind after I spent a few years learning art is that: everyone makes bad art.. even the best artists. For every good painting an artist produces, there are several that have been trashed or painted over. Sketchbooks are often encouraged in the artist community in order to allow ourselves to do bad art that doesn't have to see the light of day. And finally, when a customer buys a piece of art, they're not just paying for that piece but also for the time that the artist spent finding themselves :)
- User2000 3y ago
  There is necessarily a correlation between talent, effort and success, because you need at least one of the two parameters to succeed. And the third parameter that will be decisive is luck, but you need a pillar to allow luck to serve a purpose. The pillar is work, done with talent, effort or both. I agree that many artists who are very talented or who put in a lot of work may be less recognized than others. But in general, a great majority of artists, before having the luck, had the talent and the effort, it should not be denied. The only thing that really separates these artists from other talented artists is luck. So I would say that success is the result of a mixture of these 3 main ingredients: effort, talent and luck.
jcarrano 3y ago
I thought this was already the case, considering most "art" is garbage anyways (well, 90% of everything, according to that rule). I do not thinks artist are "punished" more for making bad works, as much as they are loosing that extra "excess attention" that our media-high society gives them. Of course, if you put regular human beings on a pedestal and make an Idol of them then any minor misstep will be unforgivable.
- nohaydeprobleme 3y ago
  Perhaps related, in software development there is the idea of the "Marimba Phenomenon" as first described in the Joel on Software blog [1], where the author observes that: "PR grows faster than the quality of your code. Result: everybody checks out your code, and it’s not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later. I call this the Marimba phenomenon." So, in the arguably creative work of creating new software, you are allowed to ship mediocre software at the start, but you do risk making a bad first impression that may be difficult to recover from. But on the other hand, if you never ship the software product, your software can become outdated by the time you eventually release it, or you can put it off indefinitely and miss out on growth as a developer. So, there can definitely be a balance between releasing a product too early and making a poor first impression, and waiting excessively to polish a product, to the point where the software becomes no longer relevant or outdated. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/06/03/fixing-venture-capital/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/06/03/fixing-venture-cap...
  - teddyh 3y ago
    Better link for “Marimba Phenomenon”: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/04/09/picking-a-ship-date/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/04/09/picking-a-ship-dat...
- Delk 3y ago
  > I do not thinks artist are "punished" more for making bad works, as much as they are loosing that extra "excess attention" that our media-high society gives them. It might be partially about attention, but the problem with fine art is probably that it needs to be something novel or reach beyond the mundane somehow. Most people can keep doing more or less the same mundane work with mundane results every day and it's still passable or even completely fulfills expectations. You can't really do that when the work kind of by definition is expected to spark something or speak to its audience.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Visual art is overrated and misunderstood IMO. Artists of the past were basically human rendering engines, which was very important because we didn’t have any other kind of rendering engine and looking at artificial images can be pleasing. Can you imagine what seeing a nice painting of a person was like when you had never seen any other kind of artificial image in your life besides handmade ones? It was probably mind blowing. Photography has probably totally destroyed our relative reaction to visual art, like someone who eats way too much sugar trying a sweet apple. But now we seem to be running on cultural fumes in this area. It’s as if people still bought hand cobbled shoes for millions of dollars and displayed them pretentiously.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  I don't believe classical style visual art is overrated. My local art gallery, the AGO, had a large exhibition on Caravaggio a few years ago and I remember seeing the shocked expressions on the majority of the visitors.
  - pfannkuchen 3y ago
    There is social pressure to have this reaction to appear cultured, which is a bit of a confounder. Not knocking the skill involved, being a high fidelity human rendering engine takes a lifetime of dedication as well as a base level of natural talent which very few possess.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      I feel pretty confident in my ability to see through people that are faking it. Maybe I am exaggerating my perceptiveness, but being shocked by Caravaggio paintings is not at all uncommon.
    - intelVISA 3y ago
      I liken camera to art as (recent) ML is to code. The machine may threaten to usurp the mass market but the few, skilled organics will always, hopefully, have artisanal works to sell.
dsign 3y ago
This has been coming to my mind in the context of fiction writing. Today, the writer's gold standard is publication. In fact, many readers say they won't read anything that hasn't been "published" by a publisher. But the incentive of a publisher is money and sales, which means they will search for things that sell in volume, or handicap the writer's work so that "it sells." And how the publisher guesses if something will sell? They will look for things that have sold in the past, they have no other way. And they will do it even if it crushes the bibliophile's soul of everybody at the editorial, because they got bills to pay. And it results in...more of the same. It's not art anymore, it's commercial fulfillment, and it's not enjoyed to the point of being remembered. There is one good thing about fiction writing though, it's called beta-reading. It's a thing authors do, but it's also a great opportunity for readers to contribute to a story, to make it more to their liking. If you ever are feeling hyper-critic of a piece of contemporary fiction, as an alternative to cancel-bombing the author because they produce "bad work" and have the daring of publishing it on their own, consider doing some beta-reading. Remember, Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was traditionally published and an amazing commercial success[^1]. [^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5IV9n223M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5IV9n223M
- dcow 3y ago
  This interesting (and I might personally add destructive) thing is happening in the romance genre where authors are going back and doctoring up all their prose from the 90s and 00s to address "consent issues" as the current cultural zeitgeist understands consent. It's not that I'm not okay with people's definition of consent changing and with writing new works to be acceptable under the new definition. And I even quite like well-integrated examples of affirmative consent in romantic literature, because a good author can weave it in ever so subtly and naturally when working with a blank slate. But this need to go back and "fix" the older works really kills me. If I could buy the older edition from the publisher that would be one thing, but in the age of digital publishing the new edition just clobbers the older ones, sometimes forcibly in your library or collection. I think there's value to being able to read literature from the 90s and understand what that time period was like, culturally. Or even works set historically back in previous centuries. I think it's important to be able to read old works and critique them, etc. I would even go as far as to say that it's okay to write modern works that lack strict adherence to affirmative consent so that they can be critiqued regardless (this might make them unpopular to the masses as pleasure reading, but it makes them interesting as social commentary). It really breaks the illusion for me when you're reading a scene from an older work and you encounter a section that was clearly doctored, or which just doesn't fit with the time period the story is set in. It's just not realistic in any way and I don't think it benefits the catalog of writing we have today to expect that authors go back and "fix" their work from 20 years ago that's suddenly become controversial by today's standards.
iambateman 3y ago
One of the fundamental principles of art is that the artist is allowed to do whatever they want. To the extent the artist is acting as a true artist, the public has no say in what they may or may not do. In that sense, their work is neither "good" nor "bad." But to the extent the artist is acting as a commercial entity – one who intends to sell a consumable product – the public has every say in the value and merit of a piece. The artist may do whatever kind of work she wants. The company may not.
epiccoleman 3y ago
I have a page for quotes in Notion. There are only a few, I try to save it for really good ones. But this quote from Ira Glass made the cut: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."
- ckolkey 3y ago
  Thats great, thank you for sharing it.
- AlwaysRock 3y ago
  Made into a nice little video here: https://vimeo.com/85040589 https://vimeo.com/85040589 Hugely useful if you are starting to get into something new or are young and frustrated that your X isnt as good as you think it should be.
  - epiccoleman 3y ago
    That was great, thanks for sharing! I'll have to file that away on my Notion page for the quote so I can watch it again.
- eslaught 3y ago
  I basically quit writing when I was 12 because of this. I really wish I hadn't, it took another 10 years to get the ball rolling on that again (and from there about 10 years to actually get good enough to like what I was writing). I could have been writing good stuff in my 20s instead of my 30s if I'd stuck with it.
devmor 3y ago
Everyone needs to be able to fail sometimes. You don't grow and learn from nothing but successes. Failure is an essential part of life and learning.
leetrout 3y ago
In case someone wants to skip a click: > Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative. I think the same applies to developing technology. Certainly resonates with me and the phases I go through.
cat_plus_plus 3y ago
At least for photography, it's important to not take yourself too seriously. You might see something amazing, and every single shot ends up out of focus, or overexposed or with garbage bag in the foreground ruining the mood. In some ways, dedicated cameras are intentionally glitchy to achieve artistic effects, so sometimes they glitch in ways you have not intended. I would imagine that in the same ways a violin is not intended to be as precise as a digital music player and oil paints are not intended to be as true to reality as a smartphone photo. The point is to keep going without overthinking and let good stuff come once in a while by serendipity, while you gain experience to gradually increase average quality. If I was a novelist with a writer block, I would try to come up with a parody of my own writing and see if some comic relief helps me relax. Sometimes I take trippy photos through a water bottle when I am bored and can't think of anything else to do.
AlwaysRock 3y ago
This has always been the case and always will be. Unfortently most people feel like they have to put everything online right away now. Most art is bad and doesnt need to go out into the world. The most creative I've ever been was when I was writing new work every day. MOST, maybe as much as 95%, of what I was creating was just okay. 4% was something that could be developed into something good. 1% was actually good. That meant in 100 days of writing 95 of those days I would feel like a failure if my measure of success was creating something good or useable. I had to shift my thinking so creating something was the measure of success and creating something good only came from creating a lot and seeing what actually stood out. If I was putting all of that work online right away I'm positive the negative feedback, or entire lack of feedback, would have been discouraging and I would have stopped.
NickC25 3y ago
Of course they should. There are countless fantastic musicians, for example, who have albums that have both great tracks and filler tracks on them. Just because someone has demonstrated greatness (even consistently) doesn't mean that every track that comes out of their studio is destined to top the charts or win some sort of award. Even the best athletes have "bad days at the office" (just yesterday, the #1 tennis player in the world lost to a guy ranked #133). Why should artists of any given medium?
- badpun 3y ago
  The difference is, artists can just shelve all the crap they made and release only the good stuff.
  - chimineycricket 3y ago
    Also, having good tracks will make up for the crap tracks on the album. Fans don't listen to the crap tracks as much. That's a benefit of throwing a bunch of darts at dartboard at once.
paultopia 3y ago
How could we stop them?
ilamont 3y ago
You really see this in the music world. Nobody comes fully formed ... you're playing covers or recording practically unlistenable demos and experiments, "getting your chops" and getting feedback from your piano teacher or whoever happens to be in the club that night. It's excruciating. But over time, you get better. Practice pays off. Playing with other people of varying skill levels pays off. You stop doing covers and start making your own compositions. You learn to improvise. And, you encounter catalysts. It could be a recording by someone else. It could be a musician who lets you do things on your own instrument that you never thought possible. It could be a club or even a clothing store that becomes the center of a local music "scene." No one remembers Jimmy Page's skiffle band, John Paul Jones' 1965 studio sessions with a half-forgotten R&B singer, or Robert Plant's and John Bonham's first band. But when those 4 came together for the first time in the summer of 1968, BOOM!
- iamsomewalrus 3y ago
  Oh man, thousands of up votes for a Led Zeppelin reference. This mirrors my experience as a musician. Learning to play gave me the confidence to go into different scenarios and recognize that I had to tolerate being bad first and then I would get it. It's a journey. It's a sacrifice. Strangely, it never felt like a sacrifice at the time.
paulpauper 3y ago
Fortunately for me this is not a problem , my problem is making good work.
coldtea 3y ago
Between the collapse of the music industry, GPT/Midjourney, big tech penny pinching ad-sponsored artists, copyright strikes for BS reasons, smaller attention spans, and a long recession (affecting disposable income), artists probably wont be allowed to make any work at all...
karaterobot 3y ago
It's worth asking who counts as an artist for the purpose of this argument. Is an artist someone primarily concerned with creating art for art's sake, and their value is in expanding the public consciousness and deepening the discourse? Or, are they an entertainer, primarily concerned with popularity and commercial success? Are these different roles judged by the same standards? For instance, we could very well say that, if you are primarily making art as a product, you are like a vendor in a marketplace. And, as a vendor in a marketplace, we consumers don't need to nurture you, or be patient with your failures. If you make a bad batch, we just move on to the next vendor selling a similar product. The definitions of art and artists have changed a lot since 1969. We used to have this concept of selling out, and if you engaged in it, you weren't a serious artist to a lot of people. We don't really have that concept today, at least not in the same way. You also might not have been considered a serious artist if you worked in a popular medium: popular music, television, comic books, etc., all of which I think most people consider valid art forms today. I'm not saying this was the right way to think about art. I'm saying that's how it was. And while I don't know a lot about David Sylvester, I see that he was a fine art critic and curator, so I am assuming he might have been talking about a particular kind of artist when he said this.

Scientists, too. Anyone, really; fail faster, people! Celebrate the process of trial and error.

mantas 3y ago
Engineers and doctors and nurses... Eh... Maybe not so fast...
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  Possibly yes, but on emulators/training data/virtual patients. One of the advantages of today's digital world is that you don't have to jump to the real thing immediately. Come to think of it, maybe even laws should be tested in a laboratory first. We cannot emulate the human society fully, but some unwanted effects could be detected this way anyway.
  - mantas 3y ago
    It's easy to find issues in laws with some brainstorming over a pizza. The problem is people pushing certain laws frequently don't give a damn about side effects. Why would they care about results coming out from a simulation?
    - inglor_cz 3y ago
      It is easy to find theoretical issues through brainstorming, but weeding out the false positives is much less easy. As an example, religious conservatives will brainstorm a lot of issues that are bound to rise (according to them) from gay emancipation. In practice, these failed to manifest.
      - mantas 3y ago
        You can easily manipulate results in a lab test too by messing with the environment and cherry picking results. And focusing on different outcomes. I'm pretty sure same religious conservatives will claim that issues they saw did come up. While the other extreme would just shrug off the same issues as non-issue. Different people value different things... More at 11.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  Maybe the statement could be refined to "must be given opportunity for failure". For some professions that might include running some projects at a smaller scale, as a simulation or even as role play exercise
- evandijk70 3y ago
  For doctors looking to innovate, there are actually a lot of ways to fail fast and safely if you introduce a new drug. First, establish that a drug binds to the target in laboratory conditions (relatively quick). After that, test the drug in an animal model. After that, proceed to clinical trials, which are phased (phase I, II, III) to first establish whether a dosage exists that is safe (Phase I), what an effective dosage is (Phase II), and only after than testing if it improves upon the current standard of care (Phase III). Each phase is more costly (both in time and money) than the previous phase and will eliminate a significant portion of drug candidates. "The success rate of each drug discovery stage in academia was 31.8% for preclinical, 75.1% for phase I, 50.0% for phase II, 58.6% for phase III." [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24406927/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24406927/
  - dahart 3y ago
    Doctors? This sounds more like the activity of a Pharmaceutical company?
- mordae 3y ago
  Even those. When the cost of failure is too high, we need to invest in practices that allow them fail safely. And get as much from failures as possible. It means giving doctors and nurses simulators, someone to look over their shoulder when learning new techniques, giving them high-quality followup data, finding top performers and make them explain what they do and so on. Which is currently very hard to do, because teaching others means you lose your advantage. It also means learning from failures of others. That means writing about the fuckups and telling them. Which is currently almost impossible to do, because admitting failure can often result in an end to your career. And all of this is exacerbated with consolidated, privatized healthcare where the shots are called not by outcome-oriented caregivers, but by profit-oriented MBAs.
- taopai 3y ago
  My grandfather, a photographer, told me this story: 20 years ago in a doctor's graduation ceremony held somewhere in Spain the old doctor who gave the speech told the graduates: "Now your job is to kill people. Along the years you'll learn, and if you are good, you'll kill less people and save some."
barberpole 3y ago
> trial and error There's a clip of John Cleese showing how Beethoven in fact composed the 5th symphony by trial and error.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  I would very much like to see that if you have a link. Google search doesn't find it for me.
  - gcmrtc 3y ago
    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wYwB3lJAbYY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wYwB3lJAbYY
afpx 3y ago
Too bad scientists don't publish their failures

I truly think of science and engineering, software development included, as an artistic feat in part. And we can easily see how the opinion expressed in this interview easily applies to what we do. Yes, we all have periods where we should be allowed to do bad work, learn on it and eventually come out with better ideas. Yes, the "public" pressure and the focus on novelty is there (right now on HN front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35955336). P.S. I have just realized that I have the "Steal Like An Artist" by Austin Kleon in my library. Proves the point of being an artist I guess :D

mlok 3y ago
Maybe the proper word is "creative" and not "artistic" ? Both have an exploration/experimental side in common.
FooBarBizBazz 3y ago
My thoughts exactly. OKR- and measurement-based management -- so ubiquitous as to be almost synonymous with "management" -- seem to accelerate certain short-term movement, at the cost of stagnation in the long term. Punctuated equilibrium is replaced by a whirling vortex.
eropple 3y ago
?> Yes, we all have periods where we should be allowed to do bad work, learn on it and eventually come out with better ideas. Most people's GitHub pages are full of this kind of junk. And in this case, "junk" is absolutely not a pejorative. It's necessary, and it can show growth if somebody's looking for it.

js8 3y ago

That's the free market pressure. The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. And it is by many believed to be a good thing, because it's very meritocratic. But it has downsides, too. People are human, not machines, and sometimes need to rest too. That's why we shouldn't leave everything up to the free market (not even the one that works in liberal theory and is perfectly meritocratic). It was also one of the justifications behind copyright, to give artists more stability.

lucozade 3y ago
> The free market only cares about your present performance, not about your past. That's blatantly not true in art, if it's true at all. If the art market agrees that some random sketch was by Da Vinci, it's not valued on merit.
- anshorei 3y ago
  A lot of that value is in the aspect of the sketch as a historical artifact. There's little present performance to speak of when it comes to Da Vinci.
  - lucozade 3y ago
    That's simply not true. Almost all the value will be because it's attributed to da Vinci. You simply won't get the same valuation if it's attributed to a lesser known contemporary. And you don't need to go historical. I just picked da Vinci as an example. If you or I made a balloon dog sculpture, it won't be valued the same as a Jeff Koons one [0]. Even if it's essentially identical. There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object. [0] I'm assuming you're not Jeff Koons. The problem with HN is that, sometimes, you are actually chatting to a celebrity in the field without knowing.
    - lou1306 3y ago
      Well, the balloon dog example simply boils down to the fact that your work will only be seen as a rip-off. > There's a whole subset of the art market that is valuing on provenance not the physical object. Subset? I believe provenance is almost everything that matters in art, because it's what equips an artifact with meaning. Duchamp's urinal neatly exemplifies this.

markusstrasser 3y ago

he's been following his own advice religiously for years

amelius 3y ago

Yes, even Leonardo da Vinci made some very bad stuff.

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

"Must be allowed to” sounds like a weasel word. It is not illegal to make bad work. I doubt any contract an artist signs usually has a clause against producing bad work either. That phrase may sound sophisticated and provocative but it means nothing, at least to me.

dghf 3y ago
It seems pretty clear to me, especially with the context provided in the article itself: don't judge an artist solely by the last thing they made; don't write them off just because they're going through a bad patch.
- awestroke 3y ago
  People must be allowed to judge and write off artists solely based on the last thing they made
  - nabla9 3y ago
    People are reading this text in two ways: 1) A suggestion is made for the readers and to the society to change how the judge and think about artists. 2) Writers tries to convey new norms, forbid judgement. What do you think the writer tried to do here?
  - User2000 3y ago
    It is preferable to take a more nuanced approach to judging artists, looking at their entire career and recognizing the inherent subjectivity of artistic appreciation, but people have a perfect right to judge an artist on a work of art, it simply shows a certain closed-mindedness
- falcolas 3y ago
  At the same time, artists of every kind have to contend with the fact that this is currently a golden age for art. We are confronted with more art of every kind than we could ever consume. The cost for moving on has never been lower. So while an artist should be allowed to have down periods, it also shouldn't be surprising if people move on. We're not looking for needles in haystacks anymore, we're looking for needles in a stack of needles. There may be value in coveting needles and hay from a particular artist, but that's an intensely personal decision to make.

j7ake 3y ago

In science the analogy is : “yeah this person did good work five years ago, but what have they done recently?” as a way to reject people for jobs, grants, and promotions.

hathym 3y ago

who told you they are not? https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-explained-maurizio-cattelan https://www.vogue.com/article/the-120000-art-basel-banana-ex...

ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago

There’s even a museum for them: https://museumofbadart.org/ https://museumofbadart.org/

antupis 3y ago
Execution is lagging here it would be more fruitful if we would see Vince Van Gogh or Pablo Picasso bad work rather than just some noname artists.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  Yeah, I know. It was just a joke.
Finnucane 3y ago
Oh no, they've moved out of their gallery at the Somerville Theater. I mean, that's not a tragedy, just less convenient for me personally.

noam_compsci 3y ago

It depends on both the hit rate (success / attempts), the churn rate (length of time a success is successful for) and finally the output rate (length of time it takes do one attempt).

nikanj 3y ago

But must they be paid for bad work?

fullshark 3y ago
And everyone needs to pretend it's good so their feelings don't get hurt?

qup 3y ago

They funded vice with like a billion dollars, right? We're not just allowing it, we're actively encouraging it.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago

Actually this applies to humans in general. One of my pet peeves is artists (and journalists) setting themselves apart as a “high priesthood” and claiming things for themselves specially which should apply to humans in general. Yes, artists should be allowed to make bad work and go through bad times because humans must be allowed to make bad work and go through bad times. Yes, creativity and freedom is important for artists because creativity and freedom is important for all humans. Yes the government should not be spying on journalists, because it shouldn’t be spying on people in general.

ivan_gammel 3y ago

Social pressure is not higher now than in the other periods, when art could be called degenerate or heresy. Newspapers were influential and before them it was church and favoritism in the high society. Van Gogh, Mark Rothko and many others were not happy people who enjoyed a lot of support from the public. We do not know the names of artists from earlier periods who vanished because they were not understood. Suffering is the fuel of art. Take your broken heart and make it into art - that’s how it works. If the pressure of social media is painful, you cannot do anything with it, so either you create or find something else to do, as it has always been.

tyingq 3y ago

It's difficult for me to reason this sort of thing. Success, or even just being able to scrape out a living from art seems like a lottery. That is, there's not really any strong correlation between talent, effort and success. Plenty of starving, yet talented and/or hard-working artists. And plenty of successful artists with less talent or effort than their starving peers. So in this case, pushing for an environment that allows for bad periods is really only trying to improve things for those that won that initial lottery.

velavar 3y ago
Something that blew my mind after I spent a few years learning art is that: everyone makes bad art.. even the best artists. For every good painting an artist produces, there are several that have been trashed or painted over. Sketchbooks are often encouraged in the artist community in order to allow ourselves to do bad art that doesn't have to see the light of day. And finally, when a customer buys a piece of art, they're not just paying for that piece but also for the time that the artist spent finding themselves :)
User2000 3y ago
There is necessarily a correlation between talent, effort and success, because you need at least one of the two parameters to succeed. And the third parameter that will be decisive is luck, but you need a pillar to allow luck to serve a purpose. The pillar is work, done with talent, effort or both. I agree that many artists who are very talented or who put in a lot of work may be less recognized than others. But in general, a great majority of artists, before having the luck, had the talent and the effort, it should not be denied. The only thing that really separates these artists from other talented artists is luck. So I would say that success is the result of a mixture of these 3 main ingredients: effort, talent and luck.

jcarrano 3y ago

I thought this was already the case, considering most "art" is garbage anyways (well, 90% of everything, according to that rule). I do not thinks artist are "punished" more for making bad works, as much as they are loosing that extra "excess attention" that our media-high society gives them. Of course, if you put regular human beings on a pedestal and make an Idol of them then any minor misstep will be unforgivable.

nohaydeprobleme 3y ago
Perhaps related, in software development there is the idea of the "Marimba Phenomenon" as first described in the Joel on Software blog [1], where the author observes that: "PR grows faster than the quality of your code. Result: everybody checks out your code, and it’s not good yet. These people will be permanently convinced that your code is simple and inadequate, even if you improve it drastically later. I call this the Marimba phenomenon." So, in the arguably creative work of creating new software, you are allowed to ship mediocre software at the start, but you do risk making a bad first impression that may be difficult to recover from. But on the other hand, if you never ship the software product, your software can become outdated by the time you eventually release it, or you can put it off indefinitely and miss out on growth as a developer. So, there can definitely be a balance between releasing a product too early and making a poor first impression, and waiting excessively to polish a product, to the point where the software becomes no longer relevant or outdated. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/06/03/fixing-venture-capital/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/06/03/fixing-venture-cap...
- teddyh 3y ago
  Better link for “Marimba Phenomenon”: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/04/09/picking-a-ship-date/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/04/09/picking-a-ship-dat...
Delk 3y ago
> I do not thinks artist are "punished" more for making bad works, as much as they are loosing that extra "excess attention" that our media-high society gives them. It might be partially about attention, but the problem with fine art is probably that it needs to be something novel or reach beyond the mundane somehow. Most people can keep doing more or less the same mundane work with mundane results every day and it's still passable or even completely fulfills expectations. You can't really do that when the work kind of by definition is expected to spark something or speak to its audience.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

Visual art is overrated and misunderstood IMO. Artists of the past were basically human rendering engines, which was very important because we didn’t have any other kind of rendering engine and looking at artificial images can be pleasing. Can you imagine what seeing a nice painting of a person was like when you had never seen any other kind of artificial image in your life besides handmade ones? It was probably mind blowing. Photography has probably totally destroyed our relative reaction to visual art, like someone who eats way too much sugar trying a sweet apple. But now we seem to be running on cultural fumes in this area. It’s as if people still bought hand cobbled shoes for millions of dollars and displayed them pretentiously.

MichaelZuo 3y ago
I don't believe classical style visual art is overrated. My local art gallery, the AGO, had a large exhibition on Caravaggio a few years ago and I remember seeing the shocked expressions on the majority of the visitors.
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  There is social pressure to have this reaction to appear cultured, which is a bit of a confounder. Not knocking the skill involved, being a high fidelity human rendering engine takes a lifetime of dedication as well as a base level of natural talent which very few possess.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    I feel pretty confident in my ability to see through people that are faking it. Maybe I am exaggerating my perceptiveness, but being shocked by Caravaggio paintings is not at all uncommon.
  - intelVISA 3y ago
    I liken camera to art as (recent) ML is to code. The machine may threaten to usurp the mass market but the few, skilled organics will always, hopefully, have artisanal works to sell.

dsign 3y ago

This has been coming to my mind in the context of fiction writing. Today, the writer's gold standard is publication. In fact, many readers say they won't read anything that hasn't been "published" by a publisher. But the incentive of a publisher is money and sales, which means they will search for things that sell in volume, or handicap the writer's work so that "it sells." And how the publisher guesses if something will sell? They will look for things that have sold in the past, they have no other way. And they will do it even if it crushes the bibliophile's soul of everybody at the editorial, because they got bills to pay. And it results in...more of the same. It's not art anymore, it's commercial fulfillment, and it's not enjoyed to the point of being remembered. There is one good thing about fiction writing though, it's called beta-reading. It's a thing authors do, but it's also a great opportunity for readers to contribute to a story, to make it more to their liking. If you ever are feeling hyper-critic of a piece of contemporary fiction, as an alternative to cancel-bombing the author because they produce "bad work" and have the daring of publishing it on their own, consider doing some beta-reading. Remember, Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown was traditionally published and an amazing commercial success[^1]. [^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5IV9n223M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX5IV9n223M

dcow 3y ago
This interesting (and I might personally add destructive) thing is happening in the romance genre where authors are going back and doctoring up all their prose from the 90s and 00s to address "consent issues" as the current cultural zeitgeist understands consent. It's not that I'm not okay with people's definition of consent changing and with writing new works to be acceptable under the new definition. And I even quite like well-integrated examples of affirmative consent in romantic literature, because a good author can weave it in ever so subtly and naturally when working with a blank slate. But this need to go back and "fix" the older works really kills me. If I could buy the older edition from the publisher that would be one thing, but in the age of digital publishing the new edition just clobbers the older ones, sometimes forcibly in your library or collection. I think there's value to being able to read literature from the 90s and understand what that time period was like, culturally. Or even works set historically back in previous centuries. I think it's important to be able to read old works and critique them, etc. I would even go as far as to say that it's okay to write modern works that lack strict adherence to affirmative consent so that they can be critiqued regardless (this might make them unpopular to the masses as pleasure reading, but it makes them interesting as social commentary). It really breaks the illusion for me when you're reading a scene from an older work and you encounter a section that was clearly doctored, or which just doesn't fit with the time period the story is set in. It's just not realistic in any way and I don't think it benefits the catalog of writing we have today to expect that authors go back and "fix" their work from 20 years ago that's suddenly become controversial by today's standards.

iambateman 3y ago

One of the fundamental principles of art is that the artist is allowed to do whatever they want. To the extent the artist is acting as a true artist, the public has no say in what they may or may not do. In that sense, their work is neither "good" nor "bad." But to the extent the artist is acting as a commercial entity – one who intends to sell a consumable product – the public has every say in the value and merit of a piece. The artist may do whatever kind of work she wants. The company may not.

epiccoleman 3y ago

I have a page for quotes in Notion. There are only a few, I try to save it for really good ones. But this quote from Ira Glass made the cut: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

ckolkey 3y ago
Thats great, thank you for sharing it.
AlwaysRock 3y ago
Made into a nice little video here: https://vimeo.com/85040589 https://vimeo.com/85040589 Hugely useful if you are starting to get into something new or are young and frustrated that your X isnt as good as you think it should be.
- epiccoleman 3y ago
  That was great, thanks for sharing! I'll have to file that away on my Notion page for the quote so I can watch it again.
eslaught 3y ago
I basically quit writing when I was 12 because of this. I really wish I hadn't, it took another 10 years to get the ball rolling on that again (and from there about 10 years to actually get good enough to like what I was writing). I could have been writing good stuff in my 20s instead of my 30s if I'd stuck with it.

devmor 3y ago

Everyone needs to be able to fail sometimes. You don't grow and learn from nothing but successes. Failure is an essential part of life and learning.

leetrout 3y ago

In case someone wants to skip a click: > Artists must be allowed to go through bad periods! They must be allowed to do bad work! They must be allowed to get in a mess! They must be allowed to have dud experiments! They must also be allowed to have periods where they repeat themselves in a rather aimless, fruitless way before they can pick up and go on. The kind of attention that they get now, the kind of atmosphere of excitement which attends today the creation of works of art, the way that everything is done too much in the public eye, it’s really too much. The pressures are of a kind which are anti-creative. I think the same applies to developing technology. Certainly resonates with me and the phases I go through.

cat_plus_plus 3y ago

At least for photography, it's important to not take yourself too seriously. You might see something amazing, and every single shot ends up out of focus, or overexposed or with garbage bag in the foreground ruining the mood. In some ways, dedicated cameras are intentionally glitchy to achieve artistic effects, so sometimes they glitch in ways you have not intended. I would imagine that in the same ways a violin is not intended to be as precise as a digital music player and oil paints are not intended to be as true to reality as a smartphone photo. The point is to keep going without overthinking and let good stuff come once in a while by serendipity, while you gain experience to gradually increase average quality. If I was a novelist with a writer block, I would try to come up with a parody of my own writing and see if some comic relief helps me relax. Sometimes I take trippy photos through a water bottle when I am bored and can't think of anything else to do.

AlwaysRock 3y ago

This has always been the case and always will be. Unfortently most people feel like they have to put everything online right away now. Most art is bad and doesnt need to go out into the world. The most creative I've ever been was when I was writing new work every day. MOST, maybe as much as 95%, of what I was creating was just okay. 4% was something that could be developed into something good. 1% was actually good. That meant in 100 days of writing 95 of those days I would feel like a failure if my measure of success was creating something good or useable. I had to shift my thinking so creating something was the measure of success and creating something good only came from creating a lot and seeing what actually stood out. If I was putting all of that work online right away I'm positive the negative feedback, or entire lack of feedback, would have been discouraging and I would have stopped.

NickC25 3y ago

Of course they should. There are countless fantastic musicians, for example, who have albums that have both great tracks and filler tracks on them. Just because someone has demonstrated greatness (even consistently) doesn't mean that every track that comes out of their studio is destined to top the charts or win some sort of award. Even the best athletes have "bad days at the office" (just yesterday, the #1 tennis player in the world lost to a guy ranked #133). Why should artists of any given medium?

badpun 3y ago
The difference is, artists can just shelve all the crap they made and release only the good stuff.
- chimineycricket 3y ago
  Also, having good tracks will make up for the crap tracks on the album. Fans don't listen to the crap tracks as much. That's a benefit of throwing a bunch of darts at dartboard at once.

paultopia 3y ago

How could we stop them?

ilamont 3y ago

You really see this in the music world. Nobody comes fully formed ... you're playing covers or recording practically unlistenable demos and experiments, "getting your chops" and getting feedback from your piano teacher or whoever happens to be in the club that night. It's excruciating. But over time, you get better. Practice pays off. Playing with other people of varying skill levels pays off. You stop doing covers and start making your own compositions. You learn to improvise. And, you encounter catalysts. It could be a recording by someone else. It could be a musician who lets you do things on your own instrument that you never thought possible. It could be a club or even a clothing store that becomes the center of a local music "scene." No one remembers Jimmy Page's skiffle band, John Paul Jones' 1965 studio sessions with a half-forgotten R&B singer, or Robert Plant's and John Bonham's first band. But when those 4 came together for the first time in the summer of 1968, BOOM!

iamsomewalrus 3y ago
Oh man, thousands of up votes for a Led Zeppelin reference. This mirrors my experience as a musician. Learning to play gave me the confidence to go into different scenarios and recognize that I had to tolerate being bad first and then I would get it. It's a journey. It's a sacrifice. Strangely, it never felt like a sacrifice at the time.

paulpauper 3y ago

Fortunately for me this is not a problem , my problem is making good work.

coldtea 3y ago

Between the collapse of the music industry, GPT/Midjourney, big tech penny pinching ad-sponsored artists, copyright strikes for BS reasons, smaller attention spans, and a long recession (affecting disposable income), artists probably wont be allowed to make any work at all...

karaterobot 3y ago

It's worth asking who counts as an artist for the purpose of this argument. Is an artist someone primarily concerned with creating art for art's sake, and their value is in expanding the public consciousness and deepening the discourse? Or, are they an entertainer, primarily concerned with popularity and commercial success? Are these different roles judged by the same standards? For instance, we could very well say that, if you are primarily making art as a product, you are like a vendor in a marketplace. And, as a vendor in a marketplace, we consumers don't need to nurture you, or be patient with your failures. If you make a bad batch, we just move on to the next vendor selling a similar product. The definitions of art and artists have changed a lot since 1969. We used to have this concept of selling out, and if you engaged in it, you weren't a serious artist to a lot of people. We don't really have that concept today, at least not in the same way. You also might not have been considered a serious artist if you worked in a popular medium: popular music, television, comic books, etc., all of which I think most people consider valid art forms today. I'm not saying this was the right way to think about art. I'm saying that's how it was. And while I don't know a lot about David Sylvester, I see that he was a fine art critic and curator, so I am assuming he might have been talking about a particular kind of artist when he said this.