What Makes a Successful Artwork

I was de-installing an ugly, be-laboured steel wool drawing I made last year, Scherzo (The Joke in Italian. Ref: the myth of the trickster, inspired by a chinoiserie jester on a swatch of fabric someone gave me.)

CONCEPT: that creativity -the art part- is elsewhere. It's not the artwork itself, which is a container/medium for the message, but something -the essence- which is less tangible. [the jester points the way]

I'd always loved the concept and the steely crumbs caught in the paper tray at the bottom much more than the actual drawing itself, which I found . . . so cloyingly literal, fussy and academic in its rendering.

The more I de-installed that drawing, 

the more a new drawing was emerging on its own.

Nearly all the pins came off and the jester began to sag {and seemed to exhale a sigh of relief}. . . .until he could no longer support his own weight (his own redundancy) and fell completely down. All that was left was the wrinkle of his simultaneous absence-presence and a telltale, pointing finger. Lovely performance-drawing, don't you think?

QUESTION: What makes a successful artwork?

ONE ANSWER: Chance and Gravity(Gravitas).