[William B.] Swann's research [published in the Academy of Management Journal] suggests that the conventional wisdom about end-of-year performance evaluations and the general good cheer demanded by the Christmas season might have paradoxical effects for many people. Managers who offer inaccurately glowing reports in the hope of encouraging employee loyalty may discover that employees with low self-esteem feel less loyal afterward, And high expectations of goodwill, charity and bonhomie at Christmastime can cause these types of people not to feel better about themselves, but worse.
Vedanta reported on research that addressed the relation between performance reviews and workers' self-images, particularly in relation to self-verification theory, described in this way:
Being just off a long weekend of critiques at UArts and in the middle of another week of them at Art Center, the article seemed to be about more than end-of-the-year performance reviews. It seemed to be about how crits go awry, and about what is expected by someone who is getting a critique - something about reaffirming their idea of themself. And that is something I cannot deliver.All people carry around an image of themselves that tells them who they are, whether they are good-looking or average-looking, for example, or clever at math, or kind and thoughtful or largely self-centered. Inasmuch as people want to be recognized for the things they are good at, Swann's work suggests many people also want honest acknowledgments of their flaws, and that when these flaws are minimized or wished away, people end up feeling worse rather than better.
Much has been made (by people my age and older) of the way the generation now completing graduate school and entering the workforce deals with criticism. The idea that this generation enjoyed uncritical praise in its youth that causes them to meltdown in the face of criticism as adults has been rolled out so often that it has attained the status of conventional wisdom. Such a broad societal observation may be ultimately untestable, and therefore should be looked at with some suspicion. There's a certain 'blame-the-victim' logic at work here, too. But more sinister is the way it turns the subject from the object of criticism - the work - to the other person in the conversation - the worker.
Outside the art world, there are millions - perhaps billions of people whose identity isn't based on their work. They may be accountants or teachers by day or for forty hours a week, but they're musicians or athletes or filmmakers at their core. While it would be foolish to pretend that criticism of a job done less-than-stunningly has no effect on the person who did it, it would be similarly off-base to assume that criticism of the work and of the person are one and the same. Artists - more than any other professionals - obviously must be capable of separating self from work to benefit from critique.
No duh. But Vedanta points to a strange problem when he uses "honest" to signifies a concordance between an individual's self-image and what others say about him or her. It's as if to say what we recognize as accurate isn't what is in fact accurate, but rather what fits our image of ourselves.
My job as a viewer is different than my job as an art-maker. My job as a viewer is to look at the work and evaluate in relation to other works I've seen or can imagine. It's not that I don't care about people; it's that I do care about art objects. Expecting a critic (or your boss, who's evaluating your performance) to provide feedback that's in line with your image of yourself is absurd. Arguably, a good deal of the art in the world is about departing from the limits of one's identity into a larger, imagined world. Fencing art works into the limits of individuals' personalities seems...sad. Not to mention impossible.
But as a teacher it seems that there is often no middle ground between students who think every positive crit is Pollyanna-ish blather and every negative crit is a personal attack. To me, it's not that emerging artists can't take criticism, it's that too many of them see the work as first and foremost an extension of or surrogate for themselves. They seem to overlook the opportunity for artworks to live in a world of other artworks, just like other products live in their contexts, and to talk about them as separate from themselves.
I feel as though I'm just scratching the surface of this problem, and that I'm declaring a position that requires a lot more explanation than this space allows. But since so many of the people who might read this are involved in making, discussing, and teaching other to make art, I wanted to put it out there.
