Reviews

In about two hours I’ll have my final portfolio review of the weekend. I can never help feeling apprehensive ahead of these things, a bit anxious. I think that’s more instinct, impulse than anything else, though—at this point I’ve shown my work enough not to take it personally when someone doesn’t like it. Some people may find a piece boring, others may find it resonant. It’s the same work; the only variable there is the viewer.

I should back up a bit, I suppose. I’m attending the Medium Festival of Photography, part of which involves a sort of art speed-dating. Eight times over the course of two days, I get twenty minutes to show my work to some curator or gallerist or publisher, introduce myself and my work and hope that it lands. It doesn’t always, of course. Reviewers are like anyone else, they have their tastes. The main difference is that a reviewer has the vocabulary to tell you why it doesn’t land. Usually.

It’s sort of a fraught relationship, really. As emotionally and physically exhausting as it is on the artist’s side of the table, the reviewers are doing a lot of work as well. And, of course, they have their own agenda. They have their own businesses and projects they need to support, so of course it will be on their minds what you can do for them. I think asking otherwise is kind of unreasonable.

Still, there are good reviewers and bad reviewers. I always appreciate when a reviewer will take the time, not just to look, but to understand at a deeper level than what’s immediately obvious. That’s actually surprisingly difficult given the format—some work just doesn’t reveal itself in twenty minutes, and if you’re trying to show more than one body of work, the difficulties only increase. Getting depth from this sort of review requires either a lot of effort or an unusually high degree of perceptiveness and ability to articulate on the part of the reviewer. But you do get that sometimes. The best thing a reviewer ever told me was in my second year reviewing. After a full day of hearing, at best, “This isn’t ready yet,” I asked him what he thought I should do differently. To which he replied, “It’s not for me to say what your work should be, or how to make it be what I would like it to be. All I can do is tell you what I see in it.”

The good ones do that. They take the time to understand what you want to do, point out where you’re doing it well, help guide you through the places where you lose your way. (We all lose our way from time to time.) Many people will prefer to tell you what they would have done, though. It’s not a particularly useful form of feedback, but it also doesn’t accomplish much to take it personally.

The thing is, the deeper a connection you make with your artistic community, the more you will find yourself in a position to dispense advice. That is, in a position where people will ask for your opinions. (Unsolicited opinions are rarely useful.) And in these situations, you kind of have to decide who you want to be. I always have an easier time offering praise for the parts I appreciate, even if I don’t particularly like the work overall. But often people want more, and so what I always try to ask is, “How can this work become more itself? More what it needs to be?” I don’t know that I’m always successful at this, but I try.

I guess it’s just on my mind, what it means to be a good artistic citizen. What it means to be a good friend. There are people who feel that not being blunt is a failure of honesty, but to me this often feels unnecessarily cruel—no less so when I’ve done it, myself. You can be honest and offer critique, and still be kind.

In any case, right now I’m in a pretty good place with my work and my creative life. I feel at peace. I hope you do, too.

Take care,

-Mike