Compliment or Critique?
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE Who doesn’t love a compliment? Happy feelings, a sense of accomplishment. In the artificial world of social media, however, we’ve become Pavlovian experiments, trained to start salivating over “likes” and “shares.” After posting, we refresh the feed just to count how many responses we’ve gotten, which we then translate into whether people like us or not, whether we belong and are accomplished. As visual artists, this constant need for praise can lead to overconfidence in our work. It can also lower the motivation to improve. The desire for “likes” overwhelms and confuses the mind, creating a sense of failure if your [...]
