You know I've gotten my share of criticism about my artwork..uh, well, I really haven't. Most people don't say anything to me directly if they don't like my artwork, so mostly I get comments from people who like the artwork and who are willing to gush about it.
Those people are geniuses I just have to say.
But I did get some slight criticism a few months ago, on a blog forum page, that I had to deal with. In some ways I didn't mind it too much -- I mean basically it's like if somebody comes into your studio and doesn't like something. I've learned that it isn't the end of the world and that for every person who doesn't like it, there are plenty that do. You don't need to change your whole way of thinking cuz one person in your studio doesn't like the work and that seemed to apply to this public criticism as well.
Recently though, I've seen an artist who has been around a long time get criticized pretty severely in the pages of a newspaper and seen how he has dealt with it. And it hasn't been pretty.
I guess if I get in that kind of situation, where I get stung by some criticism, that I hope I won't try and make it the other person's fault somehow, that I wouldn't try to convince all and sundry that in actuality I'm good and the critic's bad as a way of dealing with the situation. Which is what this artist seems to have done, and continues to do without an end in sight apparently.
To me, the criticism originally received by the artist starts to be validated by his response to it and these continued attempts to try and prove that it's the critic who is suspect not the artist really show the artist to be less of a big original thinker than I thought he was. Up to the point that he started his assault, I thought he was a person with a good vision of the world, and of art, and that he was a good spokesperson for the local scene.
Well, who knows how I would react in that situation myself and I hope I never have to find out. It's easy to comment on it, but if I were the one being criticized a person such as myself might slip into that kind of behavior pretty easily. Which makes me worry that in other ways, in other situations similar to this one where I might be criticized for my behavior, that I have a process that's similar to this artist, where I go through the same kinds of machinations this artist has done to try to prove (at least to myself) that I'm blameless.
You just wonder, I guess, it's sometimes hard to see in yourself (and easy to see in someone else).
