How Should An Artist Handle Criticism?

For God’s sake, don’t do it my way

Welcome back to Geoff Rodkey’s Bad Advice! Today’s question comes from S., a talented young artist confronting an age-old occupational hazard:

“I recently directed, produced, and wrote the book for a musical that premiered at a fringe theater festival. Some public online reviews were mixed (not cruel, but not entirely positive), and I felt embarrassed to see my work criticized for anyone online to see. How should I handle public criticism?”

First of all, S., congratulations! Writing, directing, and producing a musical that gets a public performance is a major accomplishment.

I’m not just saying that because I went to college with your dad. You created something substantial enough that random strangers took the time to publicly record their opinion of it.

That criticism is a byproduct of artistic achievement. The more work you create, and the more success you have, the more criticism you’ll generate.

Since no artist in history has ever gotten unanimously good reviews, some of the criticism will be negative, and reading it can be painful.

In the worst case, it might make you less willing or able to create future work. It might also impact the substance of the work, for both better (if you can identify something constructive in the criticism) and worse (if you find yourself pandering to the audience in ways that compromise the work’s overall quality).

All in, it’s a pretty tricky situation. Some artists handle it by never reading reviews.

At least, they say they don’t. But while this is definitely the healthiest approach—by a LONG shot—I’m not sure these people actually exist.

If they do, I have no idea how their brains work. The whole reason I started writing was to get attention. And while there was a period in my career when I convinced myself I was only doing it for the money, now the money’s mostly gone, and I’m still doing it.

So it’s got to be the attention.

Which, to be honest with you, is a real sickness. If I found out somebody had left a review of one of my books scrawled on the wall of a gas station toilet outside Bismarck, North Dakota, I wouldn’t necessarily get in a car and drive 1,700 miles just to read it.

But I wouldn’t rule it out, either.

On Goodreads, a site that serves the same function in my life as Zurich’s Needle Park did for Swiss heroin addicts in the 1980’s, the dozen books I’ve published over the last thirteen years have accumulated a total of 1,825 reviews.

The numbers I use to calculate my self-worth

I’ve read every single goddam one of them, even the ones in Bulgarian that I had to cut-and-paste into Google Translate. If I missed any, it was by accident. And all I can say is, thank God none of my books has ever been more than a modest bestseller, because if one of them really took off, I don’t know how I’d find the time to keep up.

The Bulgarians get me, they really do

I’m willing to grant the possibility that not everyone who sets out to create a work of art or entertainment is as emotionally damaged as I am. Artists might exist who summon projects into being out of purer motivations than a desperate thirst for approval. I’m just not one of them.

Unfortunately, neither are you. Because you wouldn’t have sent me this question if you hadn’t ALREADY READ YOUR REVIEWS.

So let me rephrase what you’re asking in hopefully more clarifying terms:

“I’ve just been bitten by a vampire. How do I not spend the rest of eternity stalking the earth in an insatiable quest for fresh blood?”

Good luck with that, S.! I think you’ll find it’s a whole lot easier to open Pandora’s Box than it is to close it.

Here’s some good news, though, based on my own experience: the bad reviews won’t always hurt.

Sure, at first, reading a bad review will make you feel like you’ve inserted a long, sharp, and possibly very hot needle into a sensitive part of your anatomy. But only for the first few hundred times. After that, the nerve endings in whatever part of you that you’re stabbing will have died, and you’ll no longer feel the pain.

Will the life-giving frisson of affirmation you experience from a glowing review also deaden over time? Sadly, yes. Eventually, the only way you’ll be able to sustain the high is by increasing the volume. And because you can’t get the reviews if you don’t do the work, you’re going to have to write A LOT more musicals.

An emotionally stable person who reads this might be tempted to run screaming from the entire process. But here’s the truly horrifying thing:

Attentional vampirism isn’t just for artists anymore.

About twenty years ago, somebody—depending on your cosmology, it was either Satan or a Facebook engineer—created this:

The button that ruined civilization

Suddenly, you didn’t have to create a musical, write a novel, film a movie, draw a comic book, or compose and record an album full of music to scratch that insidious please-please-please-somebody-look-at-me itch.

All you had to do was take a picture of your dog, write a snarky comment about the president, or—and this is where the snake REALLY starts eating its tail—fire off a one-sentence review of somebody else’s musical…and with the click of a button, you could shoot it into the ether and start leeching emotional sustenance from the reactions.

That schmuck Mark Zuckerberg amassed a two-hundred-billion-dollar fortune by turning the most unlovely, grasping, narcissistic part of my personality into the behavioral rocket fuel for a whole new sector of the global economy.

I just can’t believe I didn’t think of it first. But I was too busy reading my reviews.

Anyway, now we’re living in the worst of all possible worlds: a society full of people with artistic temperaments who aren’t even creating art.

Don’t be like them, S.! Keep creating the art. Write another musical! Then post about it on all your socials. I promise I won’t just buy a ticket to the show and write an enthusiastic review, I’ll also click “like” on every single one of the dozens of promotional posts you’ll have to barf out in a Sisyphean effort to raise public awareness of your musical’s existence above the miasmic flood of cat photos, political diatribes, and ice bucket challenges littering all of our feeds.

Thanks for your interest in my bad advice! And for anybody who’s read this far: please submit a question! I can’t keep this up without you.