Forum: Community Center


Subject: Give It To Me Straight - An Idea... views welcome

tuttle opened this issue on May 03, 2003 ยท 77 posts


bulldawg66 posted Sat, 03 May 2003 at 8:56 AM

i do have to agree that the constructive criticism is what is lacking. I used to belong to a local artist group here in my community and each month at our meetings we would each bring something we had been working on. we would hold it up and people would comment. We were required however to use something which somebody coined the "Oreo approach." You start out by pointing out something you do like about the work (not always an easy thing to do), then you would give your negative view and what you thought could be done to improve the piece, then you would close by either pointing out another positive aspect or repeating the one you had stated earlier. Although in practice this approach was used mainly on and for newcomers in an effort to soften the blow when the actual criticism came. Then again, you couldn't just offer a negative opinion without backing it up or saying why you felt that way, and you did have to tell what you thought could be done to make it more appealing. Although the entire process is subjective to the viewer and it was generally assumed that the people in the group had some level of intelligence to be able to discuss things in the first place. when I do get to go through the galleries here and have made comments I usually try to keep with this approach. Although there will always be those that no matter how much you cusion the criticism, they take it as a personal attack against their ego. So in the end, maybe your little "Give it to me straight" box would be a good idea. Personally, a I don't feel that a comment on my artwork is an attack on my person or my ego as I don't know these people anyway, so how could it be. To me it is only a comment on the pieces I have posted and nothing more. Lastly, I like that phrase...feed the trolls...all I can do is picture some people standing near the edge of a bridge throwing slabs of raw meat down into the mounths of the waiting trolls LOL. Sorry, just my weird sense of humour.