Constructive Criticism Where does one draw the line?

I think the biggest problem when it comes to people asking for critiques in general is that no one is willing to really hear an honest opinion. However, if you're ever really going to grow when it comes to modifications, face-ups,sewing - whatever your fancy in this hobby and if you really WANT to grow then you need the harsh honesty of scathing critique as much as delight and praise.
In my experience of University Art College....um...a decade and 1/2 ago yes, there were plenty of fluffy delicate walking-on-eggshells critiques, and then there was the critiques from our head of department...and he was harsh! He will also be remembered as my favourite lecturer as I don't recall a single harsh word he said that wasn't brutally honest and true, and any alumni from my particular degree agree that his honesty was the best wake-up call we'd ever had - and in the end we all loved him for it! Well, at least that is true for most of us.
There are always going to be the more "sensitive" individuals in any art / craft / hobby / designer-maker community, whether real (such as in the art college studio, the work-place...or your average BJD Meet) or virtual (yes, that's us here included too folks) who really don't give a crap about "growing" and would prefer to be bathed in delight and praise and have their egos stroked....and we all love a good ego stroking now and then. And, yes, it can be nasty and bad form to go and say something cruel about someone's work one way or another if they haven't asked that loaded question "what do you think?". However, I think as soon as the question is asked then the asker should be prepared to receive the good with the bad. Only ever ask for a critique if you are prepared for the answer. Otherwise, don't ask!
However, to all you critics out there also be sensitive to what the individual asking "what do you think?" is trying to achieve. If you don't like pinky frou frou, don't go telling someone off for making eveything shiny pinky sparkly frou frou. If you don't like goth, don't go telling someone off for their stylistic preferences either.
I'll end with a quote from Ted Orland's View from the Studio Door, from his chapter aptly entitled "A Community of Artists" (which equally applies to any creative community):-
"The tricky part is striking the right balance between comon goals and differing sensibilities. Lean too far toward the comfort of shared beliefs, and the result becomes more a mix of personalities than a mix of ideas. Lean too far toward the edginess of opposing philosophies, however, and a community becomes difficult."
The big difficulty I see here is trying to find just the right balance between the two... this being a place of shared interest ie. Ball Jointed Dolls; and a place of many "opposing philosophies" .. simply as it is a very large community open to people with that singular shared interest in Ball Jointed Dolls. One way or another we all have to learn to get along based on the fact that we want to keep this a warm inviting place to anyone who shares that interest.

 

This is the part of your post that I don't entirely agree with. You are correct in that people using critiques as a way of digging for praise is a problem -- they aren't going to get anything out of it, and it sets things up for drama. However, I noticed that you broke people down into two camps (and other people tend to do this too): The people who have thick skins, want to improve, and can take harsh scathing critiques and those people who are thin skinned, over sensitive, can't take it and don't really want to improve. This dichotomy does a disservice to a lot of people who fall somewhere in the middle - they want to improve, they're willing to listen to advice, but they function better with less brutality. People learn in different ways, and what works well for one person, won't always for another. There are times when some people may really need a teacher or somebody to come down really hard on them. And there are times when the same information could be imparted with a lot better effect if it was given differently. I admit that I fall in the middle. Believe me, I've gone through plenty of critiques whether it was with art work or when writing my thesis or other papers, but I function best when the teacher is honest yet doesn't feel the need to be brutal. Brutality and honesty don't have to always go hand in hand.

Here on DoA, it's particularly important to take into account that this is a hobby -- not an academic institution or a workplace, and it's filled with many different people at different points in their artistic skills and with lots of different personalities, ages, backgrounds, etc. You of course bring this up later with some other points that I do happen to agree with. But to think only one type of feedback is the way they can learn isn't going to hold true. Sometimes information given less harshly will get through to someone better than really coming down like a ton of bricks.

Yes, people should absolutely not ask if they can't handle people disliking what they did -- that's just bad news. But again, I think the delivery of the negative points can make an immense difference. Just because someone doesn't want to be treated cruelly, doesn't mean that they only want their egos stroked.

These are interesting and good points. The nature of the community itself will make some things easier than others. I think a lot comes from the understanding that being a big internet community, people need to think about how they approach critique and to do so thoughtfully. In a classroom, people know each other, work with each other, etc. That makes it easier to deal with than in an online community where we don't always know enough about the other person to be able to ascertain exactly what they need to move them forward.

 

I am not a fan of anyone giving any criticism at all unless it is explicitly asked for. For instance, I have sometimes come across photoshoots in the Gallery thread where they owner will post her or his doll pics and maybe say a few things about what inspired the shoot, what type of doll it is, who did the faceup/clothes/etc. And then in the comments someone will say something like, "I don't much care for her hair but the dress is cute" or "You should have taken those photos with a flash" etc.

I really don't find that to be the place for criticism and I'm always appalled to see it when it appears there. If someone is soliciting it, that's one thing. But to give an unasked-for opinion with any negativity in it strikes me as mean-spirited.

 

To be fair, I think some of those people aren't trying to critique outside the rules. Sometimes a gallery thread will be devoted to something like "My doll's new dress!" or have a line about "People wanted to see this sculpt", and if the dress/face isn't visible I don't think people who say something along the lines of "better lighting/change shutter speed" or "a different pose would show that off better" are necessarily people who haven't read the rules, as much as they're just responding to the original poster's comments.

 

psammead That's interesting what you brought out about Wallis, but I'm in agreement with Alewife. He may not have been taught but I still think he was following the rules. Simple because many rules that can be applied to art happen in nature, and we have for centuries perceived them before ever giving them official names. But I am in agreement that someone can learn from various sources.

Oh and the Susie Q thing, it's kind of like saying John or Jane Doe. It's just some random made up person not referring to anyone in particular. Although there is a snake in the US called Susie Q's.

 

I think Alewife and you and me are -- well if not in agreement, then in the same ballpark. (I can see you from where I am.) I think what you and Alewife are calling rules, I'm calling technique. I think that you can work technique out for yourself and you can learn it from nature or the world. I agree that you can't do without technique. Certainly Wallis had bags of technique, but he doesn't seem to have been taught it by any third party -- and I'm sure plenty of what he worked out for himself relates to what is taught in art colleges and school.

I suppose I feel a bit nervous of the word "rules" since it sounds (to me) so inflexible and seems to imply that there's a recognised number of rules and we all know what they are and that all artists should follow them. Whereas I think artists are developing new techniques all the time. I would feel very uncomfortable about saying that there exist certain rules that all writers must follow all the time. All writers must make use of technique(s) to create their story, but they can choose the set of techniques that works for what they're doing. If you want to create a pseudo- or pastiche 19th-century novel then you'll use techniques similar to Dickens or Dostoyevsky. But if you want to do a story about 3 or 4 scholars in a Hell-like environment and the devils who serve them, you'll probably pick a different set of techniques.* It's hard to write a novel without character, but not impossible. It's certainly possible to write a shorter piece of fiction without character.

Edited to add: on reflection a story about 3 or 4 scholars in a Hell-like environment done in the style of Dickens or Dostoyevsky would be really cool.

 

I can see you too! *waves*

"Rules" might not be the best choice of word. It does seem to imply something artificially imposed. I was thinking of it more like "natural laws"-- e.g. if you let go of a frying pan, it will drop down onto your foot and it will hurt. Technique, then, would be which set of rules you decided to follow.

Referring again to the entries in the Anniversary faceup contest, their challenge was to do a faceup that depicted the shadow within. A variety of techniques were used. The winner did a faceup entirely with pencil crosshatching, similar to classic pen-and-ink illustration. Another person did delicate scrolling linework with airbrushed colors, and so on. If you can use the number of votes as a yardstick, some techniques were definitely more effective than others.

 

Well, what we call 'techinque' has to have come from somewhere, right? Whether the learning is formal or innate, through instruction or through trial and error, people can get better over time and improve their skill set. A lot of that can be done through self criticism as much as peer criticism. I have been drawing all my life, although I never took formal lessons - but by observing what worked and what didn't work, and by reading informal process journals from experienced artists, I cobbled together something that works. learning which colours go together and which don't, where shadows fall, it can all be done through innate learning (observation) and trial and error.

So one can learn technique without the formal learning process. techniques are skills that have been handed down and given names - but someone had to develop them to begin with; or a string of someones, each improving on the technique of the last.

I think that critique that is outside of technique and bordering on a criticism of style is inappropriate. I took writing in uni, and the very first disclaimer we got was that we weren't allowed to judge another's work based on style or genre. Only the technique mattered, and as such we should point out parts of the writing that were confusing, or typographical errors and the like. If the techniques used were part of the style then that was purely the author's choice and they were free to disregard us.

 

waving back

Still very uncertain about this. You can't choose whether or not to have gravity.** You can choose how you do a face-up, paint a picture, write a story. The laws of physics can be demonstrated and evidence provided. Gravity is understood by adults, children, cats, dogs etc. (in the sense that a cat will get out of the way if she thinks you are about to drop something on her; she expects that if she jumps from a parapet she'll go down, not up). What makes a good novel, what makes a good painting -- these things will be argued about until the cows come home. I'm pretty sure Shakespeare used a set of techniques to write Hamlet -- but what exactly these were is not pin-downable in the way the laws of gravity are. Scholars and actors and directors and theatre-goers have argued over the meaning, techniques, aims, themes etc. of Hamlet for 400 years and these questions aren't going to be resolved any time soon.

The first sentence in the Overview section for Wikipedia's Impressionism article is as follows:

Now, I grant that Impressionists will have violated one set of rules (or natural laws) and adhered to another set. But wouldn't the academic painters have said all these rules or laws (violated ones and adhered-to ones) were equally rules (or laws) and wouldn't they have taught their students to follow all of them? The point is that something can seem like a natural law governing aesthetics, until somebody or some group breaks it and hey! what they've done is fresh and new and striking. At which point the former aesthetic law simply becomes an aesthetic choice.

Maybe I will understand your idea of "natural laws" better if we get a little less abstract. Can you give me some examples?

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not arguing that all art everywhere is equal; that any randomly-picked first attempt in a writing group is as good as Bleak House. Give me half an hour I'll come up with a wheelbarrow full of reasons why Bleak House is brilliant and superior to many things in this world, but where I get uncomfortable is when someone proposes taking those reasons and trying to deduce from them laws or guidelines for everybody else's art. It makes no sense to me. I happen to think Bleak House is vastly superior to Martin Amis's Other People. But I don't think Martin Amis should try and write like Dickens.

Absolutely. But maybe in a while we'll see a face-up with the inferior techniques used, but executed with much more skill and imagination. I loved the entries to the Shadowy competition. Thanks so much for telling me about that!

** Unless you're Mary Poppins.

 

I think this is very clear, very good. The only exception I can think of (and it wouldn't be a criticism of style, more an observation) is if a writer is working in one genre, but their style seems suited to another. If they're a beginner it might be worth just pointing it out to them in case they haven't noticed. I was working, years ago, on a detective novel, but it kept veering over into the surreal and otherworldly. I switched to fantasy and found it a much better fit for my (then) style, a much more fertile ground for my imagination. Not that there's anything wrong with a surreal and otherworldly detective novel and I'd still like to try that one day.

 

Psammed - if you ever get to write it, I'd love to read it as noir fantasy is my favourite genre! =) Unfortunately my computer has had a fit so I'm posting from my playstation's internet thingy so I'll keep it brief and just say that you do raise a wonderful point.

 

I was probably getting a little too abstract. I was thinking of how your brain works and how your eyes work. That is, distant things appear smaller than close things; dark colors recede and bright colors catch your attention; symmetry is soothing and asymmetry is jarring; and so on. You may not ever think about such things if you're not an artist, but if they're pointed out to you, you think "Oh, of course!" Then you go to art school and the instructor tells you that distant things appear smaller because of perspective, and here's how to create perspective on a flat sheet of paper. (Then you start drawing all those infernal angled lines, lol.)

I think where it gets confusing is when art genres start attaching values to one thing or another. For instance: it's also true that small things appear less important than big things. The ancient Egyptians used this version in their artwork, instead of our version "small things appear more distant than big things". So you got Eurocentric art critics coming in and saying that the ancient Egyptians had no understanding of perspective, and that perspective wasn't "discovered" until the Renaissance. Which is nonsense, of course.

I think I'm going off on a bit of a tangent, like Mary Poppins.

psammead, that's an interesting thought about using a style that's unsuitable for your subject matter. I'm going to use that thought to drag this post ruthlessly back on subject. I wonder if that might be what we sometimes find jarring about a faceup or a mod. For instance, a very dark faceup or a gore mod on a childish sculpt. So when people react negatively to that, it's the perceived inappropriateness that bothers them.

 

One thing I have to say I find amusing is that in a thread about whether or not to critique and where and when constructive criticism is appropriate it has become more about critiquing others comments on criticism! Both interestingly apt and delightfully ironic!

 

We are all being very scholarly!

 

And everyone is so civil nowadays. In the "bad old days" at least two flame wars would have arisen from a thread like this.

Psammead, please finish the book about the puppetmaster and dolls first. Sorry if i oversimplify youre idea with these two words. Ever since reading your sig I'd really really like to read it.

 

That's what I was thinking, also. I will admit, I had been a little worried, too; however, while it deviated a little bit somewhere in the middle, members were able to successfully get things back on track.