John Maio, Pete Myers and Criticism
Dear John Maio,
While much of what Peter Myers says about hostile criticism and its ill effects (and I'd say the ill effects on the critics as well) he doesn't name any of the critics about whom he writes or the venues where he finds their critiques. So the warnings are general. Good but general.
However, since he's talking about the Internet, I assume he's also talking about amateur critics, readers and/or members of photography discussion groups.
Remember that there are also professional critics, some of whom are very good and very useful, even when their critiques are negative. Negative but not hostile. "Negative critique" is not a synonym for "hostile critique."
See John Berger's essay about Picasso in his book "Toward Reality" in which he talks about the "tragedy of Picasso."
So please don't take Peter Myers' statements as an all inclusive warning against negative criticsm, only against hostile criticism, or criticism that's meant to puff up the hostile critic's sense of himself, of his superiority over others.
Unfortunately, I can't recommend any really good recent professional critics of photography who might guide you through the maze of all the bad criticism that's out there. . I haven't been reading much professional photography criticism lately.
However, for good guidelines as to how to identify good professional critics (for yourself) I recommend the first 20-30 pages of Ezra Pound's little book
ABC of Reading. Sure, it's about poetry, but it begins by establishing some guidelines for criticism.
And criticism is criticism no matter what art it's about, music, photography, poetry, decorative art, etc.
Pound tells us that "critic," "criticize" "criticism" "critique" all come from an ancient Greek verb meaning "I choose" in the sense of "I sift" -- good from bad, obviously.
His basic point is that if you want to find out about something -- in this case, what makes good photography good -- you probably should talk to or read something by somebody who knows something about the subject.
Just as if you were buying a car you'd rather talk to somebody who knew something about cars than read car manufacturer's specification sheets and among people who know something about cars you'd probably rather talk to someone who had a) built them b) repaired them and c) driven them professionally than to someone who only sold them and drove them privately.
Right?
Pete Meyer is dead right when he says
TWO: Stop competing against others and yourself.
Don't compete against yourself. Instead,
improvise on yourself.
As for competing against others, yes, Peter Myers is absolutely right if he means competing against other contemporaries. It's always a mistake to compete against your contemporaries unless you really want to wipe them off the map and for very good esthetic reasons. But in this case it isn't competition so much as it is defense of the realm, not yours but art's.
However, artists always compete; there's something about making art that makes competing necessary., I don't know what it is and don't have time to think about it right now.
So I'll just remind you of what Ernest Hemingway said: That the artist's only competition is with the dead.
Hemingway was right.
Lord Byron was wrong when he wrote this of his contemporaries
Thou shalt believe in Miilton, Dryden, Pope,
Shalt not set up Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey,
Because the first is craz'd beyond all hope,
The second drunk, the third so quaint and mouthey...
Before you read Pound and then, with the aid of his guidelines, begin to identify the professional critics who will help you along to your goal of making better pictures -- which goal is often more quickly achieved by learning how to criticize both one's own pictures and those of others -- and identify the great dead photographers against whom you must compete, here's a small bit about what it is to be an artist, taken from the American novelist William S. Burroughs' *** last novel,
The Western Lands.
The "Western Lands" of the title is the ancient Egyptian term for the Land of the Soul's Immortality after Death.
"Look at their Western Lands. What do they look like? The houses and gardens of a rich man. Is this all the Gods can offer? Well, I say then it is time for new Gods who do not offer such paltry bribes. It is dangerous even to think such things. It is very dangerous to live, my friend, and few survive it. And one does not survive by shunning danger, when we have a universe to win and nothing to lose. It is already lost. After what we know, there can be no forgiveness. Remember, to them we are a nightmare. Can you trust the peace offers, the treaties and agreements of an adversary who considers you in the dark? Of course not.
"We can make our own Western Lands.
"We know that the Western Lands are made solid by fellaheen blood and energy, siphoned off by vampire mummies, just as water is siphoned off to create an oasis. Such an oasis lasts only so long as the water lasts, and the technology for its diversion. However, an oasis that is self-sustaining, recreated by the inhabitants, does not need such an inglorious vampiric life-line.
"'We can create a land of dreams.'
"'But how can we make it solid?'
"'We don't. That is precisely the error of the mummies. They made spirit solid. When you do this, it ceases to be spirit. We will make ourselves less solid.'
"Well, that's what art is all about, isn't it? All creative thought, actually. A bid for immortality. So long as sloppy, stupid, so-called democracies live, the ghosts of various boringpeople who escape my mind still stalk about in the mess they have made.
"We poets and writers are tidier, fade out in firefly evenings, a Prom and a distant train whistle, we live in a maid opening a boiled egg for a long-ago convalescent, we live in the snow on Michael's grave falling softly like the last descent of their last end on all the living and the dead, we live in the green light at the end of Daisy's dock, in the last and greatest of human dreams..."
For Burroughs' "We poets and writers" I would substitute "We artists" which includes photographers, which includes yourself.
Best wishes on your road to the western lands of art.
yrs
ben
www.benlifson.com
***In the 1960s the very good American writer Norman Mailer wrote that William S. Burroughs, a late romantic writer who lived to be a rather old romantic writer, might be the "only contemporary American writer possessed of genius." So far, Burroughs' production between then and his death in the 1980s seems to have borne Mailer out.