The Freedom to Fail

Commentary by Bill Lasarow

"We like to say we gave artists 'the freedom to fail.' Good research requires failure. All too often, market concerns prevail over experimentation. My mantra has been to always choose artists over art! Art is a precious product of human experience, not a commodity. And, artists are keepers of an elusive fire.”

—Griff Williams, Gallery 16, San Francisco

Alison Saar, “Uproot” exhibition installation view, 2023. L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, California.

We do mourn the occasional closure of a gallery whose exhibition program we have respected and covered. Two recent closures in Los Angeles, Blum Gallery and L.A. Louver Gallery, took place for very different reasons, neither of which was due to business failure. In the first case owner Tim Blum cited the rigors of sustaining an elite international program as leading to personal burnout. L.A. Louver announced that it is wrapping up fifty years of exhibitions in its iconic Venice beach location (Private showings there and at its Adams district warehouse will carry on for a time) Louver’s founder, Peter Goulds, 77, is not, by his own account, retiring, although he is well past retirement age. But in the art world a normal retirement age does not apply. Chicago’s Rhona Hoffman Gallery closed this past spring because at age 91 Hoffman felt it was time. But her hand is still in the game. Her knowledge and connections in and well beyond Chicago’’s art world will keep her busy enough.

All have cited the expense and stress of an art fair driven environment, one that forces emerging galleries to strive to reach the top echelons of the art world and then work tirelessly to stay there.

Robert Colescott, “Untitled,” 1970, acrylic on canvas, 79 x 98 1/8 x 1 5/8”. Courtesy of Blum Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Evan Walsh.

A different case is San Francisco’s Gallery 16, which lost its lease after 32 years in operation. This may or may not signal the end of the road for owner Griff Williams’ gallery career, but it has allowed him this moment to encapsulate the ethos that drove his … business. I would not count Gallery 16 as imposing like any of the three examples cited here, but it has long been a credible and, in many quarters, esteemed player.

Ever since Visual Art Source partnered in the relaunch of SquareCylinder, we have argued that it is this very ethos of honesty and devotion that offers the Bay Area its best art world strategy as the international art market continues to focus on art fair sales — and networking — and art auction prices serve as the yardstick for success. Virtually no one in the art world will insist that aesthetic quality and price are direct corollaries of one another. But immersion in the international art market, saturated as it may be with high quality art, creates that clear impression.

Jacob Hashimoto, “Nothing seemed to anger them anymore,” 2021, bamboo, acrylic, paper, wood and Dacron, 54 476 x 8 1/4”. Courtesy of Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago.

Creativity draws a straight line to experimentation, and experimentation in visual art is not scientific, it is aesthetic. Aesthetic innovation is the ongoing result of a process that is intuitive in a way that scientific innovation cannot be (intuition plays a crucial role in the scientific process as well, but in a very different way, as many articles and books attest). Points of reference narrowly drawn from art history are also broadly drawn from virtually any discipline you care to name. Such points frequently appear to have at most a tangential relation to the objects we see on exhibit, and that is an approach that we celebrate even when we critique much of it as too obvious or too obscure. To belittle that process as lacking in the rigor and purpose of scientific or scholarly research is to fail to recognize the beating heart of what it is to be an artist. The required discipline and refinement belies this misunderstanding.

The problem for the Bay Area and a handful of other important second-tier cities around the world that play similar roles in the art world is that they figure at most only marginally in the international art market. The Big Money in art is most clearly seen in that system of art fairs and auction houses whose numbers are often what produce headlines in the mainstream media and prompt the first conversations at exhibition openings. The exhibitions presented at a gallery’s bricks-and-mortar home base are still necessary to its success, but today are insufficiently important without those other pieces to be successful on their own.

Williams is also correct to peg artists as “keepers of an elusive flame.” Aesthetics is by definition elusive. It is personal for a serious artist to strike out in a given creative direction. But any who are committed to exhibiting new work must accept that the personal at some point becomes public. At that point the enterprise is transformed from private reflection to public communication. The onus of personal experience is transferred to everyone that attends an exhibition.

Rex Ray, “Acroposwa,” 2013, painted and cut paper on oil on linen, 50 x 76”. Courtesy of Gallery 16, San Francisco.

In science and other disciplines, as progress is made questions of effectiveness and accuracy narrow. With art the opposite is true. As we progress more new possibilities open up, and what the receiving eye takes in becomes property of the viewer.

That transaction is not explained by sale prices or the names of institutional and individual collectors according to an industry hierarchy. It is explained by the connection between the artist and the viewer, a connection that is catalyzed by the work of art. And that is where the elusive fire lives.

Bill Lasarow, Publisher and Editor, is a longtime practicing artist, independent publisher, and community activist. He founded or co-founded ArtScene Digest to Visual Art in Southern California (1982); the Mural Conservancy of Los Angeles (1987); and Visual Art Source (2009). He is also the founder (2021) of The Democracy Chain. In 2025 he relaunched SquareCylinder with co-publishers Mark Van Proyen and DeWitt Cheng.