The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours. Indeed terms like serious and rigorous tend to be code words for disciplinary correctness; they signal a form of training and learning that confirms what is already known according to approved methods of knowing, but they do not allow for visionary insights or flights of fancy.
—Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
Imagine for a moment me trying to describe cringe to my therapist—a longtime New Orleans social worker in her mid-seventies. I’m attempting to explain my paralyzing hesitancy around putting myself out there: releasing a song, applying for a residency, doing anything that feels vulnerable or uncomfortable. She looked at me quizzically as if to say, “That’s it? You’re afraid people will be embarrassed for you?”
This is where the generational mismatch really comes in handy. Her inability to understand my paralyzing terror of some entirely hypothetical social consequence for trying anything was hilarious and inspiring. It helped me reconsider the foundational source of creative anxiety: failure.
Who Cares?
Failure has dimensions both real and imagined. On the one hand, not every work achieves what you intend. Artistic capabilities have their limits, and sometimes those limits show in ways we’d rather they didn’t. In other words, sometimes the work is bad.
On the other hand…who cares? The systems that govern a work’s intelligibility are largely imaginary—if often collectively agreed upon. Artworks gain status as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ through a complex constellation of tacit cultural agreements about quality, agreements that often serve to reaffirm dominant ideologies. We can choose to observe these frameworks and acknowledge their validity. We can also choose to reject them.
I think there’s some value in failure. It offers a precious opportunity to confront our own abjection. We see the ugliest parts of our process and endure the psychic pain of having produced something that doesn’t reflect the person we believe ourselves to be. The failed artwork is a register of dissonance—between the artist and themself, and between the artist and their cultural surroundings. But within this dissonance, we find emancipatory strategies and new ways of being in the world.
The Queer Art of Failure
As Jack Halberstam argues in The Queer Art of Failure, failure can be a radical and liberating act. For Halberstam, failure is refusal. A refusal to comply with societal scripts that demand productivity, perfection, mastery, and success. These scripts are deeply embedded in the systems that reinforce existing power relations. Success, in this sense, becomes a form of control. It enforces linear progress, rewards mastery, and disciplines artists to create work that fits dominant frameworks of meaning, which tend to revolve around capitalism and heteropatriarchy.
He dives deep into our cultural archive of silliness, citing works from Pixar Studios and Y2K-era comedies like Dude, Where’s My Car?. Halberstam argues that, within these ‘low-culture’ works, we find stupidity, waywardness, forgetfulness, and other expressions of failure that often contain the seeds of revolutionary thinking; we see new forms of social organization, kinship, and temporality. Feminist class consciousness is reimagined in Chicken Run, and the forgetful fish, Dory from Finding Nemo, offers us an alternative view of family and linear time. It’s a fun read that positions failure as a narrative vehicle that channels revolutionary ideas through popular culture.
Abjection
Nonetheless, failure—or the making of bad art—doesn’t feel good to the maker. Speaking again of cringe, it takes a great deal of psychic fortitude to confront your own creative refuse. To be faced with your own bad art is a confrontation the abject. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva explores the abject as a psychological and cultural category: the parts of ourselves we reject in order to maintain a coherent sense of identity. The abject unsettles because it exists at the threshold of what we consider “clean” and “proper,” reminding us of what doesn’t fit—what is unformed, grotesque, or shameful.
Kristeva uses visceral examples to describe the abject: bodily fluids, waste, corpses. These are things we cast away to create a sense of order, separating ourselves from the chaos and incoherence they represent. But the abject doesn’t disappear. It lingers, threatening to collapse the boundaries we’ve carefully drawn between self and other, subject and object, clean and unclean. We remain haunted by the work we make that reminds us of our own badness, unworthiness, or stupidity.
And yet, Kristeva’s abject also holds creative potential. In recognizing what we reject, we confront the messy, unformed parts of ourselves that defy definition. The abject reminds us of what lies outside the limits of order and meaning. In creative terms, this is fertile ground: a space where failure can give rise to new forms, unburdened by the demand for coherence.
Making Bad Art
My first and—to this point, only—attempt at a solo record is called Bad Art. And let me tell you: it’s not very good. The album was a deliberate embrace of my creative limitations. It is a short collection of half-written songs and sonic experiments written mostly during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. It explores (or attempts to, at least) my feelings of inertia and silence, my struggle to find a personal vocabulary for expression.
In so many ways, the album is about the fear of not being good enough to make music. Listening back to it, I feel somewhat uncomfortable. I can hear the gaps in my skill, the awkwardness of ideas that didn’t fully land. I hear my first timid attempts to use my voice as an instrument.
But within that discomfort, I also find a tremendous amount of gratitude that the album exists at all. Because, without it, I might still be wondering what it’s like to make my own music. This is the emancipatory potential of failure. To fail is to reclaim creativity from the demands of mastery, or good taste, or whatever. It’s to make art that exists outside the pressures of professionalism. Bad Art was named so as a loving acknowledgment that failure is not the end of the world. And, in fact, there’s no way to make ‘good art’ without first making ‘bad art.’
The Energy of Failure
Failure unsettles the illusion of control, forcing us to confront the dissonance between the artist we are and the artist we aspire to be, between what the work is and what we hoped it would become. This discomfort is not a dead end; it’s a generative force. It’s where art becomes alive. Learning to sit with the discomfort of failure might be the most valuable skill in building a durable creative practice. Over time, this openness allows us to create work that is more honest, dynamic, and meaningful.
As Halberstam argues, failure is not the opposite of success but a radical refusal of conformity. It liberates us from the tyranny of polished, linear progress and opens doors to experimentation and new ways of seeing. It reminds us that art doesn’t have to conform to dominant frameworks of value. It can—and should—be strange.
Failure carries energy—the energy of resistance and possibility. When we embrace failure, we reclaim our freedom: to make art that refuses resolution, to experiment without guarantees, and to let the work live. In failure, there is movement, transformation, and life. And ultimately, that’s what makes art matter.
Thanks for reading.
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