Why Artists Fail

One of the biggest myths in the art world is that talent guarantees success. It doesn’t.

Over the years, I’ve met extraordinarily talented artists who slowly disappeared. Some faded quietly. Some sabotaged themselves openly. Some kept blaming the market, galleries, collectors, timing, visibility, social media, everything except themselves. At the same time, I’ve watched artists who were nowhere near as gifted build stable, meaningful, financially successful careers.

That contradiction stayed with me for a long time because it forces you to question what actually sustains an artist over decades. Talent matters, of course it does. But talent alone is wildly overrated.

What matters more is temperament.

Consistency matters more. Discipline matters more. Emotional stability matters more. The ability to listen matters more. The willingness to evolve matters more.

I have seen artists with average work steadily improve over years because they stayed open. They kept working. They were willing to fail publicly, adjust, learn, and continue. They were not obsessed with immediate success. They understood that growth takes time.

Many of them were also surprisingly free from greed.

That is something people rarely speak about openly.

The artists who survived and built meaningful careers were often the ones who thought long term. They invested in relationships carefully. They did not burn bridges impulsively. They were respectful with people. There was patience in the way they approached life and work.

In Urdu, there are two words that come to mind. Deen and Imaan.

Not in a narrow religious sense, but in terms of integrity, grounding, and sincerity in how a person carries themselves. You could feel it around them. They were less desperate, less performative, less consumed by positioning themselves every second. They worked steadily and allowed time to do its work.

And strangely, those artists often ended up better placed financially as well.

Then there was the other side.

Brilliant artists who destroyed themselves through ego. Artists who stopped listening the moment they received attention. Artists who became rigid after early success. Artists who thought talent gave them immunity from discipline. Artists who became greedy too quickly and started treating every relationship like a transaction.

I have seen careers collapse because of this. Not immediately. Slowly.

At first, the talent hides the problem. The work is strong enough for people to tolerate the behaviour. Galleries continue. Collectors continue. Opportunities continue. But over time, patterns emerge. Difficult conversations increase. Relationships weaken. Trust disappears. People begin stepping back quietly.

And the artist usually doesn’t see it happening because ego creates isolation. The moment somebody stops giving honest feedback, decline begins.

One thing I’ve learnt is that the art world remembers behaviour much longer than success. People think this world runs only on talent and visibility. It doesn’t. It runs heavily on trust, memory, relationships, and reputation built over years.

I have also noticed that many artists fail because they are addicted to the idea of being an artist more than the reality of working like one. They enjoy speaking about concepts, ideas, ambition, recognition. But the daily repetition of making work becomes difficult for them. Boredom becomes difficult for them. Silence becomes difficult for them.

And art requires enormous repetition.

You have to continue through periods where nothing exciting is happening. You have to continue when nobody is paying attention. You have to continue when the work is weak. You have to continue after rejection, after failed shows, after financial stress, after self doubt.

A lot of people simply stop.

Some disappear emotionally long before they disappear physically from the art world.

Social media has made this worse. Young artists now confuse visibility with growth. They think presence means progress. They spend years constructing identity before constructing work. Eventually reality catches up. The work always reveals the truth.

I remember telling young photographers who came to me asking how to learn photography to first take five thousand images and then return. Most never came back. Some started enthusiastically and disappeared halfway. A very small number completed it. And those were usually the people who no longer needed guidance afterwards because the process itself had taught them.

That is the difference.

The people who survive creatively are usually the people willing to go through long periods of uncertainty without immediate reward. They are willing to remain students. That openness matters enormously because the moment an artist believes they have arrived, decline quietly begins.

Comfort is dangerous for artists. Early success is dangerous. Praise is dangerous. Even intelligence can become dangerous because intelligent artists become extremely good at justifying stagnation. Meanwhile, somebody less gifted but more disciplined quietly keeps moving forward.

That is the part many people struggle to accept.

Art is not a school competition where the most talented person automatically wins. Creative life is much more complicated than that. It tests patience, ego, adaptability, character, emotional resilience, and the ability to sustain belief over very long periods of time.

And often, the people who endure are not the loudest, trendiest, or even the most brilliant. They are simply the ones who kept going without losing themselves in the process.

Instinct and Decision Making

Over time, I have realised that I am instinctive when it comes to decisions. I tend to move quickly and, more often than not, that first response is the right one.

This was not always something I trusted.

Earlier, if I was faced with a decision, I would sit with it. I would go over it repeatedly, try to analyse it from different angles, arrive at something that felt more logical, more acceptable. I believed that thinking things through carefully would lead to better outcomes.

In reality, it often did the opposite.

I began to notice a pattern. The more I thought about something, the less clear it became. If I found myself going back and forth, trying to convince myself into a decision, it usually meant something was already off. The clarity had been present at the beginning. I had simply ignored it.

This does not mean that I do not think. In fact, I think constantly. I observe people, situations, behaviour, tone, silences. Years of this builds a kind of internal reference system. What appears as instinct in the moment is often the result of accumulated observation. The thinking has already happened. It simply is not visible at the point of decision.

From the outside, this can look impulsive. It can be mistaken for acting without thought. But there is a difference between instinct and being rash.

I have crossed that line before and the difference becomes obvious when you experience it. When a decision is forced, there is discomfort. It feels like something has been pushed through. There is a need to justify it either to yourself or to somebody else. Instinct feels different. It is quieter. Cleaner. It does not demand validation.

I remember a conversation with my brother. A decision came up and I said no almost immediately. He did not agree. He wanted me to think about it more, discuss it, reconsider it. What stayed with me afterwards was not the disagreement itself, but the fact that I could not explain my decision in a way that would satisfy him. The reasoning had not yet fully formed into language.

Earlier, that would have unsettled me. I would have gone back, rethought it, possibly even changed my decision just to make it more reasonable or acceptable. I don’t do that anymore.

If I have to convince myself into a yes, it is already a no.

A large part of this way of thinking comes from photography. When I am shooting, there is no time to over analyse. You respond to what is in front of you. Light, movement, expression, a fleeting moment. It either registers or it doesn’t. If you hesitate too long, the moment disappears.

You learn to trust what you see even when you cannot fully articulate it.

I have had moments while photographing where I instinctively took an image without fully understanding why. Only much later, while looking at the photograph, did I understand what I had responded to. Something internally had recognised the moment before the conscious mind caught up with it.

Over time, that way of seeing extends beyond photography. It becomes a way of engaging with life itself. You begin to sense what feels right, what doesn’t, where to engage, where to step back. The same instinct that guides an image begins guiding decisions, relationships, conversations, even silence.

This does not mean that every instinctive decision is correct. There are mistakes. Misjudgements. Moments where moving quickly does not work in your favour. But there is also a very clear understanding of what happens when instinct is repeatedly ignored.

When decisions are delayed, layered with excessive logic or shaped too heavily by external expectations, they lose clarity. They begin to feel constructed rather than true.

That is the shift that has happened over time. I trust the first response more now, while remaining aware of where it is coming from.

And if a decision requires too much internal negotiation, that itself becomes the answer.

Finding Solace in Art

There is something that sits quietly beneath everything we do as artists, and it rarely gets spoken about with any seriousness. Most conversations around art today revolve around careers, galleries, visibility, pricing, and success. These are real concerns and they take up a lot of space. But in focusing on them, we tend to overlook something far more fundamental.

Art has the ability to calm the mind.

This is not an abstract idea. It is something you can observe if you pay attention. You stand in front of a work and something shifts. Your attention settles. The constant movement of thought slows down. There is a kind of quiet that comes in, even if only for a brief moment. You may not fully understand what you are looking at, but there is still a response. It does not need to be explained immediately. It is enough that it happens.

What is often ignored is that the same process exists for the artist.

When an artist is working, the experience may not feel calm in the moment. It can come from discomfort, from restlessness, from something unresolved. But the act of making begins to absorb that. It gives it structure. It allows things that are difficult to articulate to take form. Pain, loss, confusion, uncertainty, all of it moves through the work. Slowly, something begins to shift. The artist may not always recognise it, but there is a process taking place. There is release. There is a kind of internal adjustment that happens through repetition, through engagement, through staying with the work.

I’ve seen this in my own life. There were periods that felt extremely dark while I was inside them. When my mother passed away, there was a kind of silence that stayed with me for a long time. Grief changes the texture of your days. You continue functioning, speaking, meeting people, doing the things you are supposed to do, but internally something has shifted permanently. At that time, there are no answers. You feel like you are carrying something you cannot fully process.

The same thing happened in relationships. There were breakups that felt absolute while they were happening. Situations where you believe everything has collapsed and there is no way through it. Wrong decisions at work. Trusting the wrong people. Choices that cost me emotionally and financially. In those moments, the mind always assumes the worst. You think this is the end of something. You think you are finished.

And yet, life keeps moving.

Looking back now, I can see that those periods shaped me more than the comfortable ones ever did. At the time, all you see is pain, confusion, uncertainty. But years later, you begin to understand what those experiences were doing to you. You even laugh at some of them. Not because they were insignificant, but because you realise how dramatic the mind becomes when it cannot yet see beyond the moment it is trapped in.

What helped me through many of those periods was the act of working. Photography. Writing. Looking carefully at things. Remaining engaged creatively even when life internally felt fractured. At the time, I didn’t think of it as healing. I was simply continuing. But in hindsight, I can clearly see that the work was carrying part of the weight for me.

That is the interesting thing about art. Most artists do not realise that while they are shaping the work, the work is also shaping them. The process itself changes you. Your way of seeing evolves. Your responses evolve. The work becomes a record of that movement, even when that was never the intention.

And then, at some point, the relationship begins to change.

Art becomes a profession. It becomes something that needs to sustain itself. It needs to justify its existence. It needs to perform. All of this is real. But in that shift, something else gets pushed aside. The reason the artist began.

Most artists do not start with a strategy. They start with curiosity. With a need to express. With a certain kind of openness. There is joy in it. Freedom in it. That is the foundation. Over time, that gets replaced by expectation. External validation begins to play a larger role. The work starts responding to things outside the artist. Pressure builds. The process becomes outcome driven.

And slowly, the artist forgets what the act of making was doing for them in the first place.

The quiet. The release. The clarity.

None of it disappears. It just gets buried under everything else that comes with building a career.

Which is why it becomes important to return to it consciously. To recognise that beyond all the structures that surround art, there is still a personal relationship with the work. One that exists without expectation. One that does not need to perform.

That space needs to be reclaimed.

Because that is where the deeper value lies. Not just in what the work becomes, but in what it does to the person creating it. Art does not only produce objects. It shapes the artist.

And when that is understood clearly, something begins to settle. The pressure reduces. The work becomes more honest. The relationship becomes more grounded. You begin to see that what you had at the beginning was already enough. It did not need to be replaced. It only needed to be protected.

The Myth of Discovery and the Decline of the White Cube

One of the biggest illusions the contemporary art world still holds onto is the idea of discovery.

The idea that collectors walk into galleries, encounter something unexpected, spend time with the work, engage deeply with it, understand the artist, and slowly build conviction. It still happens occasionally, but far less than the art world likes to admit.

Most collectors today already know what they are coming to see before they enter the gallery.

They have seen the work online. They follow artists and galleries on social media. They speak to other collectors. Advisors influence them. Auction results influence them. WhatsApp groups influence them. By the time they physically enter the space, the decision making process has already begun.

The gallery is no longer the starting point.

Very often, it is simply the final confirmation.

I’ve noticed another pattern repeatedly over the years. Collectors often move in groups, especially newer collectors trying to enter the contemporary art world. You speak to them individually and after a while something becomes obvious. They all repeat the same list of artists.

The same names. The same references. The same market approved choices.

At first you assume it is coincidence. Then you realise most of these decisions are not emerging from genuine personal engagement with art. They are being inherited socially.

A few influential galleries, collectors, advisors, curators, auction houses, and social circles slowly shape consensus around who matters and who doesn’t. Once that consensus forms, people begin collecting within that framework because it feels safer. Validation replaces instinct.

Which is why I’ve become increasingly sceptical of the romantic idea of discovery in contemporary art.

Most discovery today has already been filtered long before somebody enters the gallery.

And that changes the role of the gallery completely.

For decades, the white cube gallery space was treated almost like a sacred environment. Neutral walls. Controlled lighting. Silence. Minimal distraction. The architecture itself was meant to create seriousness around the work. The viewer entered the space with attention.

That model made sense in a world where physical encounter was central to the experience of art.

But the conditions around art have changed radically.

Today, most first encounters with artworks happen digitally. On phones. On screens. In fragments. Through posts, previews, PDFs, online viewing rooms, Instagram stories, and forwarded images. The collector often sees the work multiple times before standing in front of it physically.

Which means the white cube no longer controls the narrative the way it once did.

In many cases, it no longer even initiates the relationship.

And yet galleries continue behaving as though the physical space itself possesses some automatic authority.

It doesn’t.

A white wall cannot create depth where none exists. Architecture cannot manufacture conviction. Expensive flooring, polished lighting, and carefully staged openings do not automatically produce meaningful engagement with art.

If anything, many galleries now feel strangely interchangeable.

You walk into one and then another and then another, and the experience barely changes. The same white walls. The same performative seriousness. The same language. The same predictable choreography of openings and social circulation.

Sometimes it feels less like engagement with art and more like participation in a coded social environment.

The irony is that while galleries continue investing enormous money into maintaining these spaces, the actual mechanisms driving sales have shifted elsewhere.

Relationships matter more now. Trust matters more. Repetition matters more. Digital visibility matters more. Consistent positioning matters more.

Collectors follow artists and galleries for years before buying. They observe quietly. They track careers. They compare prices. They speak to people privately. Decisions build slowly over time through exposure and familiarity.

By the time they enter the white cube, much of the emotional and psychological work has already happened elsewhere.

The gallery becomes theatre.

And perhaps this is the uncomfortable question galleries do not want to confront fully.

If discovery is no longer primarily happening inside gallery spaces, then what exactly is the white cube for today?

Is it still a place for contemplation? A validation mechanism? A social signal? A luxury backdrop? A performance of cultural seriousness?

Maybe it is now partially all of these things.

But it is no longer the singular gatekeeper it once believed itself to be.

That shift matters because many galleries are still financially structured around an older idea of how engagement happens. They continue investing heavily in physical presence while the real movement increasingly happens through networks, relationships, fairs, private conversations, and digital ecosystems.

The power has decentralised.

And once power decentralises, authority weakens.

This does not mean physical spaces no longer matter. They do. Standing in front of a work still carries something that digital experience cannot fully replace. Scale, texture, silence, physicality, presence. These things remain important.

But the white cube is no longer the beginning of the conversation.

At best, it is now part of a much larger system of visibility and validation.

And perhaps galleries need to stop pretending otherwise.

Because the myth of discovery has survived far longer than the reality itself.

The Cost of Being Seen

Over the last few years, a growing number of galleries have opened spaces in Defence Colony. It did not happen accidentally. Once a few galleries established themselves there, the area began developing a certain perception. It started being seen as an art district, and like most things in the art world, once perception settles in, people follow it quickly.

Everyone wants to be where everyone already is.

On the surface, the logic appears sound. Collectors can move between spaces. Galleries benefit from proximity. Visibility increases. The location itself begins carrying cultural value. Slowly, the address becomes part of the positioning.

But when you look beyond the surface, the entire thing starts becoming difficult to justify.

Defence Colony is one of the most expensive areas in Delhi. Rents are extremely high. Spaces are small. Parking is limited. Access is inconvenient. From a purely practical and financial perspective, it is not an ideal environment to run a contemporary gallery from.

And yet galleries continue moving there.

The reason is perception.

Nobody wants to feel absent from where the art world appears to be gathering. Galleries fear invisibility more than they fear bad economics. Being present in the “right” location creates psychological reassurance. It signals seriousness. It suggests legitimacy. It creates the impression that the gallery belongs to an active cultural ecosystem.

To manage the financial pressure, many galleries reduce their physical footprint. Smaller spaces become the compromise. The logic is straightforward. If you cannot control the rent, reduce the square footage while maintaining presence.

But this is where the contradiction begins.

Because the blunt truth is that walk in sales for most contemporary galleries are almost non existent.

People romanticise the idea of collectors wandering through galleries, discovering work unexpectedly, falling in love with an artist, and building collections through physical exploration. That image survives because it sounds culturally sophisticated. In reality, that is rarely how the contemporary market functions anymore.

Most collectors already know what they are looking at before they enter the space.

They have seen the work online. They follow the gallery. They have spoken to advisors, collectors, curators, friends. The decision making process has already started long before the physical encounter.

The gallery often becomes a confirmation point rather than a discovery point.

I remember an incident during an art fair in Mumbai that stayed with me because it revealed this very clearly. A collector walked into our booth, stood in front of a ceramic sculpture for perhaps ten seconds, called his wife, and immediately decided he wanted the piece. What followed was not a conversation about the artist, the work, the process, or even why the piece mattered to him. He spent far more time negotiating the price than engaging with the work itself.

That moment stayed with me because it stripped away many of the illusions the art world likes to maintain about itself.

The physical space did not create the connection. The booth did not create understanding. The collector did not need prolonged engagement with the work. The transaction moved almost instantly towards negotiation and acquisition.

Which raises a serious question.

If physical spaces are no longer the primary drivers of discovery or sales, what exactly are galleries paying these extraordinary rents for?

Very often, the answer is visibility.

And visibility is a dangerous thing to build an entire financial structure around.

Contemporary galleries do not operate with the same margins as the market for moderns or masters. The price points are lower. Sales cycles are slower. Collector confidence fluctuates more. Which means the economics become fragile very quickly.

A gallery may look active externally. Openings happen. People attend. Images circulate online. The programme appears busy.

But underneath that surface, the pressure quietly builds.

High rent changes behaviour. It forces galleries into constant activity. More shows. More fairs. More visibility. More pressure to sell. More pressure on artists. More pressure to maintain perception.

And slowly the gallery begins serving its own survival mechanisms rather than the art itself.

This pattern is not new.

Cities like New York City, London, and Paris have already demonstrated what happens when cultural ecosystems become too dependent on expensive districts and symbolic positioning. At first, clustering creates energy. Then costs rise. Then sustainability weakens. Eventually many galleries disappear quietly because the economics no longer support the illusion.

The cost of being present overtakes the value of being present.

Delhi is moving towards a similar tension.

And the uncomfortable reality is that many galleries already know this.

Privately, most gallerists will admit that walk in sales contribute very little to their actual revenue. Serious collectors operate through relationships, direct communication, previews, fairs, private appointments, digital visibility, and networks built over years.

The gallery space itself has become increasingly symbolic.

But symbols are expensive to maintain.

That is why so many spaces now feel trapped between two realities. Financially, the model is becoming difficult. Psychologically, nobody wants to leave because leaving creates the appearance of decline.

And perception remains one of the strongest currencies in the art world.

What makes this situation more complicated is that younger galleries begin copying the same structure without fully understanding the economics underneath it. They assume proximity creates legitimacy. They believe presence in the “correct” geography automatically strengthens positioning.

But location alone has never guaranteed relevance.

Good galleries build trust, clarity, relationships, and strong programmes over time. A prestigious pin code cannot replace those things.

The danger is that many galleries are now building themselves around visibility before stability. Around perception before sustainability.

And that eventually creates exhaustion.

Because at some point the numbers catch up. They always do.

The difficult question galleries need to ask themselves now is whether they are building spaces that genuinely support long term engagement with art, or whether they are participating in a system that increasingly survives on optics.

Those are two very different things.

And the distance between them is growing quietly every year.

Do It Now

There is a tendency to delay things that we want to do. It does not always come from fear. Often, it feels harmless. You think of something, you intend to do it, and you tell yourself you will get to it later. Most of the time, you do not.

A thought comes in. It can be small or significant. You feel like doing something, going somewhere, starting a piece of work, exploring an idea. Instead of acting on it, you hold it. You postpone it. Later becomes the response. The problem is that later rarely carries the same energy as the original moment. When the thought first appears, there is a certain clarity to it. It is direct. It is unfiltered. That is what gives it strength. When it is delayed, that clarity fades. Other things take over. The moment passes. What remains is an idea that feels less urgent, less convincing.

Over time, this becomes a pattern. You begin to live more in the idea of doing things than in actually doing them. Thinking starts replacing action. You imagine how something will be, you build a version of it in your head, and that becomes enough. But it isn’t.

I’ve seen this very clearly in the artists I’ve worked with. There have been artists who came to the gallery with potential. Good thinking, interesting direction, the kind of work that could have gone somewhere. We’ve had conversations, discussed what needs to be done next, what direction they could push in. And then nothing happens. Months go by. Sometimes years. They are still thinking about the work. Still talking about what they want to do. Still refining the idea in their head. But the work itself doesn’t move. Slowly, you can see the gap widening. Not because they lacked ability, but because they never acted when it mattered.

I’ve said this to a few of them directly, sometimes out of frustration. Khiyali pulao banana band karo. Stop cooking ideas in your head. At some point, it has to move into the real world. Because the real world is where things change. It is where ideas get tested, where they fail, where they evolve. In your head, everything works. Everything feels complete. It is also safe there. Nothing challenges it. The moment you act, that illusion breaks. And that is exactly what needs to happen.

From my own experience, the times I’ve acted immediately, even without complete clarity, those moments have always led somewhere. Not always where I expected. Not always in a straight line. But always better than holding on to the idea. Because action creates something real. You now have something to respond to, something to improve, something to discard if needed. Thinking doesn’t give you that. It keeps you in a loop.

This applies directly to creative work. Many people wait for the right conditions. The right time, the right mood, the right setup. It rarely comes. Or when it does, it doesn’t match what you imagined. The work begins when you start, not when you feel ready.

Even in smaller things, the pattern is the same. You feel like doing something and you delay it. You negotiate with yourself. You tell yourself you will do it tomorrow. Tomorrow becomes next week, and then it disappears. Over time, that becomes habit. Avoidance becomes normal.

Life doesn’t wait for you to feel ready. It moves regardless. So the only thing that makes sense is to respond when the moment is there. Act on it. Not perfectly. Not with complete certainty. Just begin. Because action has a way of opening things up. It breaks the illusion, forces movement, and brings you back into the real. And once you are there, things start to shift. Ideas become work. And work is the only thing that matters.