Who Can A!ord to Fail? Art and Risk in an Era of Precarity

Failure is often associated with risk taking and an entrepreneurial spirit, indelibly linked with the ruptures and expansions of contemporary capitalism. Like other aspects of capitalism, the opportunity to take risks and fail is not equally distributed; who can afford to fail? In the arts, a healthy tolerance for failure is set against a backdrop of increasing institutional managerialism, risk management, and conservative curation that prevents failure before it has the opportunity to take a breath. This is particularly evident in institutions such as art museums.