impact of your art. It's just that simple.
Another important determination you have to make about responses to your art is whether a particular comment is based on the individual's personal tastes or is instead based more on their overall knowledge and understanding of art-- your type of art in particular-- and their familiarity or experience with the art world as a whole. Usually it's the former-- someone either likes or dislikes your art only in terms of what they find personally appealing, and has little or nothing to do with the quality, meaning or significance of the work itself. Personal-taste types of criticisms are still worth listening to, especially if you hear similar versions of particular reactions over and over again, but at the same time, you can't take it all that seriously because it's not really about you or your art, it's about other people and their tastes. In other words, don't get all bent out of shape when someone speaks about your art in less than glowing terms, based solely on his or her individual preferences for what they like or don't like in art.
If however, a person's comments are more informed, objective, made within broader art world context, and are based more on facts relating to art in general rather than one particular piece of your art, then you should perhaps consider them more seriously. a broader art world context, and are based more on facts relating to art in general rather than one particular piece of your art, then you should perhaps consider them more seriously. For example, I see accomplished works of art all the time that I do not find the least bit appealing personally, but it's still good art and I still have plenty of good things to say about it. And the opposite goes for not-so-good art; even though it's not quite ready for primetime, I still love it. The important part is when I do decide to dialogue with an artist, I remain objective, leave my tastes out of it and consider the art purely on its own merits or lack thereof. These types of objective dispassionate agenda-less criticisms are the ones worth paying the most attention to.
Regardless of who's telling you what, you always have to keep the bigger picture in mind rather than flip out every single time anybody says anything the least bit contrary about your work (many artists fall victim to this, and it's almost always way more energy draining than productive to fixate on isolated incidents). Think more in the aggregate, in terms of cumulative feedback over time. That's what really educates you about the impact of your work, and about how and what it communicates to others-- not any one person's remarks, no matter who that one person may be. Compile information more like a census taker and catalogue, categorize and accumulate data. Over the long haul, general response patterns to your art will emerge and become increasingly clear. You'll begin to see similarities in how people react to and experience your work, and you'll be able to make progressively more informed decisions about how to present yourself and your art to everyone's advantage, and to ultimately advance in your career.
Taking any one person too seriously is never good-- regardless of whether that person happens to have a profile in the art community or has the ability to influence your career. The art world is so huge, especially in the Internet Age where pretty much everything is
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