The Art of Failure: Hybridity, Risk and the Limits of Artistic Projects, 1450–1900.
9th Philipp Hainhofer Colloquium.
The Augsburg art entrepreneur Philipp Hainhofer (1578–1647) designed highly elaborate display furniture, most of which contained numerous, equally masterfully crafted fittings and ranked among the most complex works of art of his time. Whilst the Pomeranian Art Cabinet (1611–1617), the earliest of these grand pieces of furniture, was created as a commissioned artwork, Hainhofer had his later major projects produced only for the open market. These works combined artistic and iconographic conception, the organisation of a collaborative working process that brought together a wide variety of arts, the marketing of the finished product, and, not least, logistics, transport and conservation. His late pieces of furniture reached such a degree of complexity and scale that, whilst exceptionally artistic, they were virtually impossible to sell due to their high prices and the difficulty of handling them. In other words: Hainhofer deliberately pursued an artistic concept, even though it was fraught with a high risk of failure.
For this reason, the 9th Philipp Hainhofer Colloquium has chosen the issue of failure in the arts and sciences as its starting point. As is known, Hainhofer was not only an art agent; he also acted as a mediator of knowledge and political information. Consequently, the focus will be on projects and works in the visual arts as well as those in the field of knowledge dissemination, spanning from the late Middle Ages to the period around 1900. The aim is to take a comparative approach to examine specific projects in art and book production against the backdrop of the risk of failure and to identify the critical factors involved. A variety of aspects may play a role here. First, the general conditions must be addressed, such as material and technical problems during production or innovation processes leading to new, experimental, yet untested methods. Furthermore, the discrepancy between the artistic or publishing ambitions of producers on the one hand, and market pressures and the expectations of audiences and clients on the other, can be identified as a key reason projects might fail. Ambitions and strategies of competition can escalate to such an extent during the creative process that, from a certain point onwards, projects become unmanageable and resources—both in terms of time and funding—are stretched to breaking point. Furthermore, such projects may become difficult to communicate to the public or remain incomprehensible due to a lack of comparability, a consideration that applies not only to art but also, in a similar vein, to publishing ventures. Likewise, the aspect of functionality must be taken into account, particularly in projects involving architecture and the applied arts, but also in sculpture (for example, in the case of funerary monuments).
The planned conference will therefore focus primarily on the inherent momentum of artistic and scientific working processes, under the key concepts of ‘hybridisation’, ‘complexity’ and ‘scale’. The scope is intended to encompass all genres of art and book production, ranging from projects such as Hainhofer’s art cabinets to the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the late 19th century.
Researchers from all academic disciplines are therefore invited to submit proposals for an interdisciplinary exchange on the conference theme. Please send your proposal (max. 2,000 characters) together with a CV (including details of relevant publications, if applicable) by 30 September 2026 to: Ha********************@******ne.de
Travel and accommodation costs for speakers (in the case of tandem teams, usually for one person only) will be covered by the organiser. If you are traveling from abroad, we will also try to cover the costs, but we may only be able to cover a portion of the travel costs. – The conference languages are German and English.
PhD students and postdoctoral researchers are strongly encouraged to apply.
Accepted papers will be published in an edited volume by Andreas Tacke, Michael Wenzel and Marika Keblusek, in the Hainhoferiana series by Michael Imhof Verlag (Petersberg) in March 2028; the deadline for submission of all manuscripts is 3 October 2027.
Organised and funded by the DFG long-term project (HAB, Wolfenbüttel and the LEUCOREA Foundation, Lutherstadt Wittenberg) for the annotated digital edition of Philipp Hainhofer’s travel and collection accounts (namely Prof. Dr. Dr. Andreas Tacke) and the Institute for European Cultural History (IEK) at the University of Augsburg (namely Prof. Dr. Günther Kronenbitter and Prof. Dr. Ulrich Niggemann) in cooperation with Dr. Michael Wenzel (Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel) and Dr. Marika Keblusek (Associate Professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society).
