After reading Strive to Fail, I felt that Lisa Le Feuvre’s argument was that no one can critique a piece of art and classify it as a failure. Only the artist can justify his or her work as a failure based on what their intentions were for a particular piece. For example, an artist may find their sculpture a failure because they could not make what image they had in mind, but the audience could see it as a masterpiece. Sometimes artists have intentions on what they want to make but cannot produce these because they feel like they don’t have the skills to, so they create something different which ends up being better than their original idea.

Failure does not mean that someone is a bad artist or that the piece they made was necessarily bad. Failure for an artist can mean that they were unable to make something from their imagination successfully. However, the audience may not know the artist’s original intentions and may think that their work is a masterpiece. No one can really claim what art pieces are successes and failures. It depends on the person’s interpretation of the piece itself.

As an artist, I think you shouldn’t be afraid to fail. Failing is good because you learn from your mistakes and take the audience’s negative critiques to make yourself a better artist. No matter how talented someone is, there will always be room for improvement. There will always be things that could have been done differently that could make the piece more appealing.

However, an artist should be able to explain their purpose for making something. If the audience knows the purpose of an image or piece of art, it can help them analyze your artwork in a new perspective. They may be able to understand why the artist chose to use certain elements in the piece as opposed to others. For example,”In [John] Baldessari’s Wrong (1967-68) – a technically ‘wrong’ photographic composition, in which the artist stands in front of a palm tree so it appears to sprout from his head…” (Le Feuvre ). From a technical perspective, the photograph is not a good photograph because of the placement of the tree. However, it could be the artist’s intention to take that image that particular way because it could represent something drastically different than what the audience is thinking. This is why it’s hard to justify whether or not a piece of artwork is a failure.