Failure is welcomed and doubt encouraged at The Centre for the Less Good Idea, William Kentridge’s new interdisciplinary arts incubator in Johannesburg. For its inaugural season, artists, poets, digital designers, dancers, actors, and even boxers came together, in Kentridge’s words, “to see the meaning made in the process of making” rather than focus entirely on any predetermined goals. This mission is characteristic of the South African artist, whose work—including charcoal drawings, stop-motion animation films, sculpture, opera and theater productions—is an open-ended accumulation of objects, people and ideas. This endless accumulation connects to his unwillingness to suppress the absurd, which he discusses here along with failure and the absence inside artists that inspir...