What would you give to hear what people thought of you, candidly, without them knowing you were listening? Your own private blind focus group.<\/p>\n

While at a house party a few weeks back, Sharkboy, three other guests and I, were discussing a painting hanging prominently in the living room of our hosts. As I turned to look at the canvas, I noticed that the artist, James Huctwith, was sitting behind us, his eyes darting from his work, to us, to his shoes. The others in our group either didn’t know he was there or just didn’t know who he was. The painting we were all speculating on was a rich, dark red image of a profile of a man lying on his back. Viewed from mid-stomach up, the man is shirtless, hairy chested, goateed face towards the heavens, and had a puff of smoke or breath coming from his mouth.<\/p>\n

“I think it’s his last breath,” says one guest, eerily.<\/p>\n

“He’s hot.” Pause. “Sexy hot, not warm,” says another.<\/p>\n

‘He’s smoking,” suggests Sharkboy, churning up the homoerotic.<\/p>\n

“It’s quite well done,” I say, to stoke this barrel of monkeys to provide James with some comment or criticism on it’s execution. Call it a focus group giveaway for his eavesdropping.<\/p>\n

“It is,” they conclude. Nothing more. Damn.<\/p>\n

I poke again: “I think he’s lying on some velvet in a meat locker waiting for the butcher to come suck his dick,” I say. I look at James. James is smiling at an unseen guest across the room. Sharkboy comments on how smoking is hot but disgusting and the conversation turns. There you go James, I tried.<\/p>\n

Flashback to 2003. I am standing in line at Timothy’s Coffee Shop waiting to purchase a tea. In front of me, Dennis O’Connor<\/a>, head of Church St B.I.A. and owner of O’Connor Gallery is chatting with Kristen, the owner of Timothys.<\/p>\n

“What do you think of the art?” Kristen says waving at the canvases of comic book pop art.<\/p>\n

Dennis makes a face that resembles someone removing a hangnail from his freshly stubbed toe while sucking on a lemon while listening to Britney Spears give birth to her first sprog.<\/p>\n

It was my artwork up at the time. Kristen was trying to illicit a comment candidly the same way I was doing for James. And I appreciated it. I know that you can’t please everyone when you put pixel to monitor, paint to canvas, pen to paper and the negative comment was accepted with a grain of salt. I was thankful for the unfettered input and was actually pleased with Dennis’ reaction.<\/p>\n

Flashforward to last night. I am again hanging art at Timothys (I’ll post images later) and I’ve asked an older gentleman to vacate his seat for a few seconds so I could hang my robot-on-top-of-a-car-highway-surfing painting. With my back to this guy I hear him mutter ‘disgusting’ or ‘ridiculous’ not sure which. It certainly wasn’t a mumble of art appreciation.<\/p>\n

And like before, I was glad of the honesty. I would rather have someone honestly tell me what they thought of my art or work than to coo coo me into a false sense of security.<\/p>\n

I bet that a couple artists who read this blog (Darryl, Evil Panda) have had similar situations where they were privileged to hear comments of their work without the commenter knowing they were listening\u00ef\u00bf\u00bd<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What would you give to hear what people thought of you, candidly, without them knowing you were listening? Your own private blind focus group. While at a house party a few weeks back, Sharkboy, three other guests and I, were discussing a painting hanging prominently in the living room of our hosts. As I turned […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":430,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":""},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9WjY-6W","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/430"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.deadrobot.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}