| Ahh, you ran into one of my "favorite" types of people to show up to makerspaces: the self-important art-nerd who thinks s/he knows everything and is really only looking for a place to show off and find validation. We had a couple of people like that show up to my old space in Philadelphia (garsh, I miss it). My favorite was the writer who thought he was liberal enough to drop the "N"-word ironically. It's this sort of artist's attitude that was one of the reasons I got out of fine art in the first place. I never fit in with the other artists because, for me, the construction of the thing and the experience was reason enough to do it, not because I had any thing to "say" by the creation of it or the style I chose. I suppose it would have been nice to have known where the cultural meme of flat-pack plywood furniture had come from to influence you to think it was a cool idea to try it. Or hell, maybe you did come up with the idea in a near-vacuum: I don't think it's impossible that you could have found yourself in the same conditions as the Eames' to then come to the same conclusions. But that's kind of the whole F/OSS point on copyleft and anti-patents. Ideas, on their own, are almost worthless. The value of a thing is largely in the execution of it. If the execution of the thing does not lend itself to a lot of value, then the idea wasn't very valuable to begin with. These people, who want to nitpick what you do and find any way they can criticize you (you don't have the right tools, you don't have the right process, you don't have the right reason), they're doing it out of jealousy. They have found themselves, for one reason or another, incapable of performing the way you do. Maybe they can't manage their procrastination and ever get anything done, or they don't have the patience for detail work and their stuff comes out crooked, or maybe they are capable, but only after extreme effort. Never, ever let those people discourage you. Their criticism is their own insecurity. They see your work and feel it reflects on them and shows them as a failure. Just ignore them and keep working. Keep making. |
Stop trying to come up with some general theory about all critics who don't build. Some of them will be tools, others have a unique skill. A good example is Pauline Kael, legendary movie critic, who wrote more than a few lines about the role of her profession not simply as a foil for the artist.
It seems to me that the critic's task should be to help people see more in the work than they might see without him. That's a modest function, and you don't need a big theory for it.
There are a million factors that influence execution (luck and randomness are not insignificant either), and there is no natural reason why the critic and the executioner need to be the same agent.