How to Fail

Overheard the other night at a concert, spoken by a woman seated nearby: "I wanted to be a painter. Then I went to Paris and made the mistake of visiting the Picasso Museum. I phoned by dad and told him, 'Why bother!? I'll never be that good.'"

I've heard similar sentiments from others, including my oldest son, who writes music but is aware that others - many of them great - have gone before. "I hate Bach!" he said to me recently. "I could never write like that."

If you're any sort of artist, you've probably gone through the comparison stage of development in which comparing your work to the work of X, Y and Z makes you turn ashen. It's only natural, if you are, say, a composer, to consider the great line of masterpiees and master composers strecthing back hundreds of years and feel...inferior. Classical music suffers particularly from this, since composers are aided in their inferiority complexes by classical performers, who are notoriously quick to say things like, "Why are you writing a piano sonata when Beethoven already wrote 32 of them?"

Natural this is -- and fatal. Don't even go there. To think that you could be no more than a pale copy of someone else is a sure path to failure. The idea, anyway, is not greatness, and certainly not greatness on the scale of a Bach or a Picasso. It's making the art you love and need to make. Whatever you create, it will be a new entity, something uniquely yours that no one else could have brought into the world. If you have something to say through the art you make, it won't make a bit of difference that you didn't invent Cubism or lift the art of fugue to transcendental heights.

If you are a young artist, get through the comparison stage as swiftly as possible. Note the great artists who went before, absorb the work they did. And then forget them.

- KLF

PS - Come to think of it, with new art being made on YouTube by amateurs (folks who may never have heard of cubism or cared to know what a fugue is), and with this new art being consumed by millions of casual listeners and watchers over the Internet, is it even relevant to think about, let alone compare oneself to, the great artists of the past?