Music: Crimson Jazz Trio, "Starless"
Time: Night.
I'm prefacing this post with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt:
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
"Citizenship in a Republic,"
Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910
Why that quote? Because yours truly is, for the first time, cast in the role of art critic. I've been assigned to review an outdoor installation for a regional publication. (Sorry, I can't be more specific than that.)
I take photographs. I know lines and composition and whatnot (heavy on the whatnot), and I can string a few sentences together coherently. Does this qualify me to be a reviewer? Someone thinks so, at least.
I do want to remain mindful of one thing, though: My name's on the review, not on the artwork. It takes something to put your vision out for public consumption and criticism, and I do have to respect that courage. I have to let the writing show that, too.Beyond that ... well, it is out there for public consumption and criticism. Fairness also demands that I not gush, if gushing is unwarranted.
I suppose the bottom line is that I want to write this in a way that would strike me as fair, were someone to write up my upcoming photo show in the same way.
No harm, I'd say, in measuring the Golden Mean with the Golden Rule.
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