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The Art of Reacting Well to a Negative Review
Advice for creatives on moving on from a critical comment
How should creative people react to a bad review? Feeling hurt — hand on dagger — is all too easy, but is there a more useful way to respond?
For most people, the thought of creating something and then sharing it with the world does not, in its inspiration, in its genesis, include the idea that somebody out there is going to knock it down.
In this way, a bad review or a critical comment nearly always comes as a shock, followed by a creeping sense of despondency.
No wonder then that creatives across history have acted in all manner of ways to a bad review — many of them not to be recommended.
Bad Reviews Happen to Everyone
The first response to a bad review or a negative comment is not to panic or lose your rag. Don’t lose your cool.
For instance, don’t do what the 19th-century French painter Édouard Manet did, for whom a bad review was enough to propel him to violence.
When the critic Edmond Duranty wrote an unflattering review of a series of new paintings, the artist was so incensed that he stormed into Paris’ Café Guerbois’, slapped the offending commentator across the face…
