A Handbook for Emerging Artists
On Art, Business and Life
Processing feedback can be challenging; someone’s remarks might have hurt you or left you dumbfounded about what to do next. To process feedback satisfyingly, consider the general three-step approach to challenges: to prepare, to create agency, and to review what happened.
Consider reading the following three chapters:
“Reviewing a feedback session” is one of the three important parts you need to care about when having a feedback session (the other two are “preparing for feedback” and “creating agency”).
Understand the feedback to consist of preparation and performance, both of which should ultimately be reviewed by you. You can see the entirety of this as an operetta consisting of three acts, with the final one again being under your control. Review the entire situation and cadence in order to understand your personal key takeaways: your preparation, your performance, and the specific feedback.
This can help you transcend the emotionality of the actual feedback round, and let you come to your own conclusions on how to proceed. Sidestepping the post-mortem won’t make the feedback less important, but risks appropriating the feedbacker’s words, without filtering them properly through your own set of values. Doing so will let you understand and form your own set of values.
Consider the following:
“Creating agency” is one of the three important parts you need to care about when having a feedback session (the other two are “preparing for feedback” and “reviewing a feedback session”).
Even though your work will be discussed by someone else, this doesn’t mean that you should be passive. Strive to create agency in feedback situations: by preparing for the situation (the previous point), by anticipating the course of the discussion, and by knowing that in the end it will be you who will analyze, and thus judge the feedback’s quality.
Consider the following steps:
“Preparing for feedback” is one of the three important parts you need to care about when having a feedback session (the other two are “creating agency” and “reviewing a feedback session”).
Feedback is most often given for a selection of works (chosen by you), and tends to consider your verbal contextualization – preparations for a feedback session should therefore at least include these two topics. There are various other things to consider:
Ideal feedback would consider the person behind the work, their condition and progress. It would compare the current iteration to their previous work, while putting it into the proper art historical and societal contexts. It would be highly attentive and radically honest, and offer guidance through specific, actionable feedback (“Read up on the work of X”, “Look into the late works of Y”, “Experiment with wood, now that you focused on metal so much”, “Did you consider using oil instead of acrylics?”) – and would explain why the specific feedback is deemed important.
Ideal feedback would offer contextual criticism: “This doesn’t seem to work as you intended, potentially because you did X”. It wouldn’t speak in absolutes, and thus wouldn’t criticize works as “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong” – because these judgements only make sense in the context of specific quality ideals; instead of saying “I like how you did this”, ideal feedback would be drastically more specific: “Since you stated that your goal was to counter stereotype X, using this choice of color makes seems to work in your favor – it puts the piece in an unexpected context”.
Ideal feedback would care about both the artist and the state of art, while acknowledging that all opinions ultimately are subjective: yes, a feedbacker might have more knowledge about various fields (than the person who created the work), but that knowledge might not turn out to be relevant for the specific context or artwork – already because it always has to be the producing artist themselves who has to decide on their work’s quality ideals. Ideal feedback would judge without being judgemental. For all these reasons, ideal feedback is rare.
Ideal feedback would follow safe space principles, and would specifically
You can’t easily influence who talks to you about your work – if people are moved by it, they will do so even without asking whether it’s appropriate or whether you’re ready for it. Non-ideal feedback will happen. While it’s impossible to always anticipate the quality of feedback, it’s possible to judge exactly that after it happened. This enables you to sift through whatever information was given, to find what’s most valuable for you – enabling you to appropriate what has been said, and develop your own opinions about it. Your humbleness, sensitivity and self-worth are key to processing feedback effectively – to discard what’s irrelevant to you, without missing growth potentials.
Processing feedback represents a balancing act, since it connects the two universes: the feedbacker’s and the artist’s.
You might lack the expertise, credibility, authority and success of the feedbacker, but are usually an expert in your own life and history. While they might be experts in the field in which you want to improve and progress, they probably aren’t experts in your life, and of your work. They often don’t know why you did what you did. They might not even be interested, but rather care to focus on the medium’s history, and how your work deviates weirdly and wrongly from it. Their cultural, societal, gender- or generation-based background might differ too much to understand the potential of your work.
An expert interested in offering ideal feedback will not simply talk positively or negatively about your work, neither of which helps you: if you came for facts and advice, someone’s praise or disapproval doesn’t really help a lot: it’s too obviously subjective, and not at all actionable; instead, it can be seen as lazy way of telling someone off. Someone actually invested in your growth would instead offer various references (art historical, political, semantic, aesthetic, etc) and actionable strategies.
All of this shows that ideal feedback is hard to find. To navigate feedback satisfyingly nevertheless, consider the following chapter.
Artists constantly receive feedback for their work, entirely independently of whether they’re looking for it. Feedback comes in many forms and attitudes, and for all sorts of reasons. It’s most often thought about as a tool to increase insights into one’s work practice: a feedbacker offers thoughts about your creation. Depending on the feedbacker’s knowledge about art history, politics, symbols, metaphors etc, your understanding about your work might increase – which ideally leads to you creating stronger, deeper, more focussed and simply “better” work.
The challenge with feedback lies in the multiplicity of art: because art isn’t monolithic, there can be no clear definitions of what creates a “good” artwork. Resultantly, the feedbacker’s knowledge might simply not be relevant to your aesthetics or vision. In the worst case, their opinions and preferences don’t match yours at all. In case of the feedbacker being in a position of power (eg. an art school teacher), you (a student) might be strongly inclined to favor their comments over your own opinion. This can also happen if you feel insecure about your creation: you might be on to something, but might not yet be strong enough to see or believe in it.
That’s why feedback benefits from people who are radically open-minded, and transparent about their intentions; an ideal feedbacker won’t have their advice be formed by their specific aesthetic and semantic opinions and preferences, but will be able to offer meta advice: if that is the direction you want to head towards, this might be able to get you there. This includes knowledge about the creator’s progress: the better a feedbacker understands the creator’s intentions and history, the better they might be able to offer advice on how to improve their work, according to its (and not theirs) inner logic – aesthetics, semantics, materials, etc. In contemporary art, the worst feedback is one that aims towards specific aesthetical goals, and wants to transfer them to a creator.
The ideal feedback setting is similar to a therapeutic safe space: both parties can rely on openness and transparency, aimed to increase enlightenment.
Feedback benefits from understanding the intentions of both the feedbacker and the person seeking feedback:
Feedback can happen explicitly or implicitly:
In educational settings (art schools, workshops, etc), feedback is used as a major tool to convey insights, and thus to help you learn about yourself and your work. But even in institutions, feedback isn’t always explicit (as in scheduled feedback sessions): it can appear in casual comments by colleagues, assistants, teachers or curators, and isn’t always based on the feedbacker’s preceding analyses or self-inquires. Quite often, feedback is given seemingly as instantaneously as the artwork hits the feedbacker’s nerves. Since implicit feedback surrounds artists a lot, it is good practice to look out for this sort of “impromptu feedback”, and to increase once competency in recognizing it. Some people can register and analyze new work extremely quickly and sensitively – but most don’t have this capacity.
Feedback doesn’t simply include the potential for transgressions; in extreme cases (depending on the power dynamics, individual sensitivity and empathy) the act of offering feedback can itself be transgressive, especially if it is “offered” in ways that are too offensive to you. Even though often unrealistic, it’s healthy to expect the upholding of safe space principles for any kind feedback, independently of whether it’s given in explicit or implicit settings – whether it’s a family member suddenly discussing your work on the phone (when you didn’t expect it), or your professor during a scheduled feedback session. Feedback should only happen when you are ready for it – a safe space can’t exist if there isn’t knowledge about mutual control and respect. When someone pushes to give you feedback, it can be smart to understand them as an aggressor, independently of their position and power.
Technically speaking, feedback returns information to the source of a signal: your work can be seen as the signal, and you as its source. As creator, you’re probably attached to your creations (your “signals”): you had specific reasons that led to their creation, and likely had to overcome obstacles during the creation process. This might have required all sorts of experiments and frustrations, but might also have shown potentials for further investigations. You might feel unsure about some of your choices, and happy about others. Creating an artwork is a complex, and often unstable process: quality ideals need to be established, knowledge of craft/materials/processes needs to be increased: at first, every artwork is a bold statement – potentially bolder than you. That’s why feedback situations are inherently challenging: your work, and thus your ideas, your intellect, your emotionality, your whole self, is put under the spotlight. Feedback can put you at a crossroads: do you believe in yourself and your work, or in the feedback that might want to see your work transformed?
Processing feedback requires you to balance trust in yourself with trust in someone else:
How you navigate these topics is both deeply personal and philosophical, and always has tremendous consequences for your work. That’s why it can be a good practice to actually ask the feedbacker: Should I really listen to you? What if I don’t? Couldn’t worthwhile work emerge from pursuing my voice further?
Contemporary art thrives on diversity – your voice might be a relevant addition to it. For this reason, teaching and discussing contemporary art practices often differs from teaching traditional crafts, where quality ideals are predefined and often static. In the arts, quality is an extremely dynamic and personal attribute – it’s a multitude. Feedback and self-esteem are closely related. Feedback and luck are closely related as well: if you’re insecure about your work, and get to be a student of a highly successful, yet sadistic artist-teacher, a lot of your voice and ideas, your hopes and dreams can be erased or diminished before they ever got to exist.
Feedback can result in you feeling small and irrelevant – or praise your work to the heavens. Neither helps you to grow. To transcend this, establish a proactive attitude: judge what was offered.
Some feedback settings will feel as if your work gets judged, stripping you of autonomy over it. Never lose this autonomy: judge the feedbacker and their advice’s quality and empathy, and ultimately work on setting up a network of trusted feedbackers: people on whose knowledge and advice you can rely on, and who care about safe space principles. Pursuing this search puts you in control (of the search, and ultimately of the setting and participants), even though you might still feel small and irrelevant.