scheherazade wannabe

Because I realized after a couple of meetings that my moments of baffled distress during them were centering around a pattern of our votes electing by majority to reject most of the good, interesting stuff and agree to publish the very bland.

So I was looking around this room of people I mostly liked or respected if not both, trying to figure out what the fuck when there was no reasonable way of asking, until the day we by majority vote sent definitely the best thing submitted all year back pending 'revisions' which of course would not be made, because the poet would definitely either become demoralized or know for damn sure she was too good for our stupid journal. I have no idea which it was; it's a question of mindset, and the submissions were anonymous.

This good poem was rejected for two reasons, both of which were actually manifestations of it being good. One was that it had made a couple of the board uncomfortable--not by having any shocking subject material, mind, just by provoking emotions with unusual descriptive language and indirectness--and they'd transmitted that uneasiness throughout the group during discussion.

And the other, seized upon as an excuse in light of the first, was that by being complex in terms of both structure and notion it had drawn several of us in, interested enough to engage critically and respond in depth, and so we'd marked it up with lots of places we thought a word choice could have been a little stronger, a line break had been a little odd; ways we thought it could have been a more excellent version of the poem we perceived in it. None of them ways it was actually bad. Just places we felt it could have been better.

At the same meeting, we voted to accept a poem that was an utterly tepid rectangle of predictable nothing-in-particular, because no one could find anything in it to object to.

It wasn't good. It wasn't noticeably bad, either, though; it was one consistent level of mediocrity clear through, and thus no part of it stood out as a weakness, and therefore the committee found it more acceptable than the poem that was superior in every way, but which by being daring and interesting had left itself covered in vulnerable places.

The process by which a group of reasonably intelligent people who mostly have reasonably good taste can still wind up collectively favoring the weak and unremarkable art over the strong and complex.

Because it's not just dumb people with bad taste in decisionmaking positions, or the public Lowest Common Denominator barometer of interest, or cynical marketing teams with very low opinions of their audiences. Like, those for sure are things, but this tendency is also just...an emergent property of group decisionmaking.

One that will tend to crop up whenever it's not compensated for in some way. Committees tend toward the conservative by nature of their structure.

And there's a lot you can do with this knowledge, other than create works infused with your own cynical contempt for your imagined audience. (Seriously. Don't do that.)

What I think is the most important actionable point, which I highlighted above, is you can apply it to interpreting critique constructively, because constructive criticism is a two-player game.

I know a tendency in myself (heightened by why I realize in retrospect were my parents' truly terrible communication skills) and have seen it often in others to think of quality, improvement, and success in terms of the elimination of flaws; to see each individual shortcoming in a creation as a bite taken out of its ideal form, and thus a diminishment of its total value.

This idea is demoralizing, and makes it hard to take artistic risks whole-heartedly. And, especially combined with a defensive frame of mind, it tends to the encourage obsessive pursuit of erasing vulnerable spots as a measure of quality and worthiness. Which, in turn, leads to very poor art for a number of reasons.

The one we're focusing on here being that it becomes bland and characterless in the pursuit of a version of perfection that consists only in negative terms, as 'the inassailable.'

So: do not measure your work primarily by its count of flaws, or count any and every point on which it can be criticized as its ruination. That is not a reasonable measure of value.

A real thing should not be placed in competition against its imagined perfect self to determine its worth; among other reasons sometimes the perfect form of one thing is less impressive or useful or beautiful than a incomplete attempt at something else, and anyway if you already have one of the ideal thing you don't need a second. And if you only see each of them in terms of their distance from perfection that value is lost.

And while 'critical' analysis isn't the same thing as 'criticizing' they will often coincide, because the more invested someone is in a piece and the more points of mental engagement they have, the more likely they are to find something they want to push back at.