Showerthought: Is a $200 failed sourdough starter 'accidental art' or just a waste?

I spent like 4 months trying to keep a sourdough starter alive. Fed it fancy organic flour. Followed every YouTube tutorial. It got moldy and smelled like nail polish remover. Total loss maybe $200 with the flour and time. But the pictures I took of the mold patterns were kinda wild. Some looked like galaxies. One looked like a feather. I posted them here and people liked them. So is it art if it cost me money and smelled bad? Or am I just coping with a failed hobby? Has anyone else turned a kitchen fail into wall art?

2 comments

2 Comments

evan_morgan8117d ago

Art is partly about making people see something new, and those mold photos definitely did that for people. You spent real money and effort on something that failed, but the result created something visually interesting that other people connected with. That's a real thing, not just coping. The nail polish smell is just part of the story, like how artists talk about the messy process behind their work. Plenty of famous photos are of decay and rot, just look at any botanical art series. Your starter was a science experiment that ended in failure, but the documentation turned into something else entirely.

scott.grace17d ago

Oh totally, @evan_morgan81, you nailed it with "the documentation turned into something else entirely." I had a similar thing happen with a batch of kombucha I was trying to brew, it just grew a gross thick pellicle and smelled like vinegar. I was so mad about wasting the tea and sugar, but my roommate snapped a close up of it with her phone and the light caught all these weird bubbles and layers, it looked like a weird alien landscape. I ended up printing it out and it's still on my fridge, way more interesting than the perfect batch I finally made later. Sometimes the failure just has a better story than the success.