Of course the work is not just the work. If it were, the whole critical enterprise would be a titanic waste of time, and I don’t believe that it is. There are many cases when critics attempt to armchair-create rather than critique–I think we see this when people go after, say, the Comics Journal not because they’re not reviewing superhero comics, but because they’re not coming to the right conclusions about those superhero comics; or when people go after The Sopranos for a lack of whackings during a particular episode or season; or when people went after Eyes Wide Shut for not giving them enough boners; etc. Sometimes what you want a given work of art to be is not what that work is supposed to be. I’ve fallen victim to this trap myself, or so Tom Spurgeon has told me at least once.
But sometimes what you want a given work of art to be is what it probably should have been. Sometimes authors make the wrong choices in terms of what to show or how to show it. The window they place over the events of the fictional life of a given character is too narrow, too broad, too opaque, too transparent, too open, too shut, or facing the wrong direction entirely. The author can say “No, no, it’s exactly the way I wanted it–it’s your problem if you don’t like the view,” but that doesn’t make it so.
Here in the trenches of blogville, we each of us get raked across the coals on a semiregular basis, being told by a couple-three dozen other smartypantses why our line of thinking does or doesn’t make sense. It would never occur to me to respond “Yeah it does–you just don’t get it.” Well, okay, it would from time to time, but that would very much depend on the person in question and the strength of his or her argument. The folks involved in picking at Demo are some of the brightest in the bunch, and the arguments are all pretty sound, whether or not you agree with them. Which, of course, you are free to do or not do. The work is the work, if you must; but if you must, you must also know that it can be good or less so, and critics can help analyze why.
At any rate, if I were the Demo team, I’d think it’s pretty neat that my work generated as much heartfelt and informed discussion as it in fact has. We don’t get this kind of mileage out of The Art of Greg Horn, you know.
As it turns out Demo #7 is my favorite of the series so far–we seem to be trending upward, which excites me.
(More fascinating Demo talk at Jason Kimble, Dave Fiore, Peiratikos, and their respective comment threads.)