When an artist – a real artist, not just a person who makes art – decides to produce a body of work, they attempt to convey something beyond the physical trappings of the piece. Picasso did this with his impressionistic works; an old Spaniard working by candlelight that wanted to show everyone the way he saw the world changed more than hundreds of his contemporaries because he had a unique form that spoke out from behind his peers’ homogenized work.
There are always people who stand in the way of forms of progress whether or not they have good reasons, or that what they stand against is valid or invalid. This is present in science as well as more ephemeral creation, and is ubiquitous where there is radicalism in ideas: that Galileo observed the heavens and made calculations based on mathematics that anyone could verify, didn’t change the fact that people strongly resisted whatever he put forward simply because he contradicted popular opinion.
This creates a problem: it’s hard to say that there’s a “bad” idea.
Sure, you can say that an idea’s inefficient, or that it simply cannot fulfill its goal, but “bad” is qualitative: and idea you don’t like isn’t bad, it’s just an idea you don’t like. This even further confuses the idea of ethics when applied to criticism, as by under these principles one cannot dismiss an theory that functions.
Earnest critical eyes in the 21st century are proving difficult to find, then – criticism is essentially in flux because it is convenient to dismiss and ignore. In fact, one could argue that our whole social structure is designed now around our ability to discard information that we don’t wish to see, even before we know what it is. Is this healthy? I’d say it isn’t.
This is a real life example that happened to me two days ago, stemming from an incident that happened months beforehand where I’d submitted a poem to a poetry contest. Regardless of its crappy quality, I put my shoe in and put in a modified poem of mine from earlier in the year, and then promptly forgot about the whole incident.
Flash forward to about a month or however long it took for the next school newsletter to come out, and I see the faces of my fellow applicants and the names of the accepted poems to be passed onto the Dorothea competition. I wasn’t there, but that was fine because I never thought I’d be. I told my friend the chain of events, that I hadn’t gotten in or heard back and she said something to the affect of:
“Well, what do they know? Besides, it isn’t your kind of poetry, really. Think about how many poetry competitions Bukowski entered and how many he won. Forget about it.”
That’s all fair. She makes good points. She’s a good friend of mine, I was happy with the answer, I forgot about it.
Again, we move forward, this time to two days ago. I’m sitting with my teachers/supervisors for SDI and it somehow comes up in the conversation while I gave my terrible presentation that I actually had gotten into the Dorothea contest – in fact, the school’s judges liked my submission and I’d been invited to attend a small photo opportunity for the school newsletter for the article that was advertising the poets who had been selected; I had not turned up, so I was discounted.
I’m not going to complain here about the matter of me not being informed that I had an event to attend, and as such could not – this isn’t the place for that, and I’m sure they exhausted all possible avenues of communication to try and get in touch with me (after all, they only had my personal email address, my school email address, my house’s address, my personal phone number, my home phone number, my class schedule, all of my teachers within a call, my parent’s corresponding forms of contact, my emergency contact’s information and months of time – I mean, they aren’t miracle workers), so I just rolled with the punch and finished up the presentation. I told the same friend of mine that I had told beforehand about what I’d found out, and this is what she had to say:
“Fucking idiots.” Verbatim.
The same idiots that I submitted my work to? We get back to the convenience of dismissing criticism. If these people are idiots, why would I want to ask for their approval in the first place? Why listen to anyone if you can just dissolve their opinions.
Alfred Whitney Griswold said that the surest weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. That’s the ethic I try to bring into practice.
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Scrawls on the walls: