ABSTRACT
Contemporary art worlds are full of unsuccessful outsiders (Becker 1963, 1982). Few artists achieve objective success compared with the mass who attempt it. Others experience difficult professional and personal conditions in their lives. While artists’ career success has been widely investigated from economic and sociological points of view, few studies have focused on unsuccessful artists and barriers to their success. Unsuccessful visual artists are defined here as those artists who are not able to value their work despite a high level of personal investment in the practice of their art. They are on the periphery of the art worlds; they are not able to enter any structured world, but nor are they successful in producing a new world for themselves. While they are not truly at the margins of society, in the sense that they are quite a long way from those we would generally call the outcasts of society, even though they may be living in precarious situations, they have nevertheless become sidetracked from the contemporary art worlds, and this can basically be defined as a characteristic of intra-artistic deviance. In 2009 and 2010, a broad qualitative action-research project investigating unsuccessful visual artists’ careers was conducted in a French region. The general research question was: what are the barriers to success for these artists? This chapter presents results from this research, focusing on specific sociocognitive barriers. The theoretical framework is built around a multdisciplinary literature overview combining boundaryless career framework with the sociological ‘art worlds’ perspective.
