There's a great William Gaddis essay on the player piano where he claims failure is essential to art, both in an elitist sense of ensuring only the genuinely talented rise to the top and in the sense you're talking about, and that technology's removing it.
Agapē Agape // The Secret History of the Player Piano
PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE
PIANIST
HE IS DOING HIS BEST
Posted in a Leadville saloon, this appeal caught the passing eye of Art in its ripe procession of one through the new frontier of the eighties, where the frail human element still abounded even in the arts themselves. "The mortality among pianists in that place is marvellous," Oscar Wilde observed: was it the 'doing his best' that rankled? redolent of chance and the very immanence of human failure that that century of progress was consecrated to wiping out once and for all; for if, as another mother-country throwback had it, all art does constantly aspire toward the condition of music, there in a Colorado mining-town saloon all art's essential predicament threatened to be laid bare with the clap of a pistol shot just as deliverance was at hand, born of the beast with two backs called Arts and Sciences whose rambunctious coupling came crashing the jealous enclosures of class, taste, and talent, to open the arts to Americans for democratic action and leave history to bunk.
[...]
Roused by the steam whistle, democracy's claims devoured technology's promise, banishing failure to inherent vice where in painting it remains today, and America sprang full in the face of that dead philosopher's reproach "to be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls." By the nineties the arts had already begun their retirement at Hull House, where they were introduced as therapy; while in the streets the discovery of Spencer's "immutable law" drove Jack London howling "Give me the fact, man! The irrefragable fact!"