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Kovacs: I knew I’d regret saying anything. Okay, first, calm the fuck down. I’m not having a go, I’m not trying to start a fight. I’m quite sure that I couldn’t win it if I did. I’m not painting you as a bad guy, I think all we’ve got here is a difference in how you and I choose to criticise things. I’ll go through your post quoting lines like you did with mine, but I think the best we can hope to end up with is to agree to disagree. But maybe you’ll understand where I’m coming from and why I posted. Oh, and I’m not a writer, K, so all these posts take far more “EFFORT” for me than they do for you. I don’t know what that does for how seriously you choose to take my opinion.
If I knew the artists, as some of you may do, I would be much more reluctant to criticise. But as I said, should I be super-charitable about work published online just because someone hasn't been paid for it? I don't get it. It's a competition. How is it insensitive to be critical about someone's submission? Someone's going to win this, presumably, and others are going to lose. In your terms, that's gonna hurt someone's feelings.
Personally, I don’t know any of the artists there. Not Ex, not any of them. Never spoken to Ex online and don’t recognise any of the other names. Although I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget the name Dalton Sharp, now. Anyway, no need for the implied ‘you versus us’.
And “Super-charitable” doesn’t come into it, do you really see no difference in the criteria you apply to professionally produced and amateur work? And you say “In your terms”: I was trying to use sensitive in the critic-should-be-perceptive-enough-to-take-into-account-the-factors-that-shape-the-creative-process sense of the word. Factors like time spent, motivation for doing it, the rewards gained, whether the intended audience is a paying audience, a fan audience, a captive audience, an indifferent audience. These matter when you settle down with a blank sheet of paper. To even suggest judging all the participants in Strip Fight as if they’re wannabe professionals is uncharacteristically naive of you, and I think maybe it’s a blanket standard you’re applying without actually bothering to consider whether the artists have set other standards for themselves. Which is your right...
You genuinely think that if you can't make a positive comment about a work of art, you shouldn't say anything at all?
You’re rephrasing what I said and possibly changing the meaning slightly. Anyway, to clarify: if I’ve got nasty things to say, then personally, I try to balance that out with a little nice. If there’s nothing nice at all, then no, I don’t usually bother. Can’t see the point, life’s too short, la la la. That’s just me. Ridiculous? If you want.
I came back and filled out my first response out of courtesy, because I was challenged and thought it was a fair challenge.
Challenged how, exactly? You were asked for your vote on the Strip Fight site that was linked to. The vote is the primary feedback the contributing artists are competing for here. You decided off your own back to come back to this thread and write a ‘brusque’ post. Oh, sorry, that’s right, I’m supposed to be getting over that one. Really, I’d get over it a lot sooner if you’d stop firing lines like “roll on 2005 when you've dealt with that” out from behind your “apology for the brevity of my initial post”. Apologise or don’t.
Was my second post not fair enough, in that it expressed a view and gave reasons for it?
Perfectly fair, in those terms. Okay. Here’s what I was trying to do, because I didn’t exactly scale the heights of intelligent criticism in my first post. I voted, then I came back and posted to encourage anyone else to also vote. Saying Ex’s piece is fab is little more than cheerleading, but I really did like it very much, and didn’t feel like drafting out some pompous paragraph on the innovative use of space or whatever. Didn’t seem necessary. I voted and I then I announced my allegiance with a shake of the pom-poms. Others have voted and not, it’s no big deal. This is a thread in Conversation, I just thought it’s to announce, to link, to Yay! and to Woo! and suchlike. I just don’t see the need for a Boo! Hiss! in there. If you want to expand on your reviews there’s a thread down in the Creation forum where the various strips are being discussed. And there’s also a board for just that purpose on the Strip Fight site. So, you want the big difference that I (and I alone, I’m quite harmless and there’s no big anti-Kovacs bandwagon rolling here) see between your second post and Sleaze’s strip by strip review that you quoted from? It’s that Sleaze finds the ones he likes as well as he ones he doesn’t. That’s all. Nice balancing the nasty. And that’s why I boiled both your first post and your 14-paragraph second post down to ‘I don’t like’. When I initially posted about you ‘crashing into threads with nothing nice to add’, I actually deleted a line after that, because I really didn’t want to look like I was down on your second post too. But the fact remains, you bothered to write another 14 paragraphs and yet still had nothing pleasant to say, and that’s what I meant about ‘carrying on’. As if it matters, I’ve got no problem with your opinion on the Dalton Sharp strip, I’m not questioning you on why you don’t like it, I’m glad you’ve come back to give reasons, and I might even agree with you. I’d just far rather you’d told us what you liked, not because it’s compulsory or secret board policy or anything like that, but because it’s a good thing to do. Life’s too short to pull nothing but sour faces.
...Is what I reckon. Like I say, at this point we’ve both expanded and expanded, and perhaps we can happily agree to disagree on this one. Faynites and all that. Anyway, if you scoot around the site you’ll probably turn up some example of me tearing into something without adding any nice qualifiers, thus neatly shooting me down in flames with a minimum of effort. It seems that nearly everyone else in this thread is bending over backwards to point out that they’re not picking on you, and I’m only trying to pick out your posts in order to disagree (whilst remaining as agreeable as possible) with the spirit in which you’ve approached the Strip Fight project.
I think maybe there are interesting wider points bubbling up here about what constitutes ‘valid’ and ‘informed’ criticism. And not just rubbishy trite points like me going ‘let’s all be nice’. When you’ve tried to draw, and really put some effort in to your drawing, you understand other people’s drawing far better; understand better what they’re doing and what they’re trying to do and how successful they’ve been. I am currently the world’s worst ever harmonica player, but since I started trying to learn harmonica, my understanding of what all those guys are doing on the records I enjoy so much has increased a millionfold. Before I was just dancing along, and I could only judge a record on how good it was to dance to and to listen to, and now I can hear cleverness and musical jokes and cheats and brilliance and all sorts of things, even though I can’t actually play like Sonny Boy Williamson. Nothing better for increasing your respect than trying and seeing exactly how far you fall short. |
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