The Roots of Unfairness: the Black Swan in Arts and Literature (2004)

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

It is a sad fact that among a large cohort of artists and writers, almost all will struggle (say, work for Starbucks) while a small number will derive a disproportionate share of fame and attention. The same applies to the so-called masterpieces that determine a canon: a few pieces displace others from the lists in a “winner-take-all” effect –all the while the neglected pieces languish and disappear from our literary consciousness. It is even a sadder condition, and that is the concern of this discussion, that a large share of the success of the winner of such attention can be attributable to matters that lie outside the piece of art itself, namely luck. Why is such luck invisible to us? Much of the analyses and explanations of the success (and attention) usually focus on the piece itself taken in isolation –the critics usually fail to include the losers, the “cemetery” of unpublished or forgotten works. Often, the failures also have the same “qualities” attributable to the winner, but these are concealed and hidden, tucked away from the observer’s scrutiny. [via]

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