On the Imaginary Critic

I do not know about the 'standard' way of creating something. I only have a slight understanding of the creativity process myself through my own endeavors, through weaving prose, composing romantic poems to realizing engineering design. Some stresses a lot on aesthetics, some on the function and some both.

I'd always hated critics when I unveil the product in front of them, and they have everything to say about it. Unfortunately you always take in the bad comments instead of flattering compliments. Someone saying 'It seems to have something amiss' or 'It just didn't click with me' crushes, entwines and harrows the soul. You just learn to be increasingly ignorant over time to these so-called 'unartistic' people who just happened not to have the inner eye for tasteful pieces.

However, somehow, unfortunately, these critics who had voiced their opinions over the years will have such a great impact on your creativity process that you actually embed them in your subconscious. They become the eyes in our minds, casting all those egregious comments, making themselves extremely loud amid the silence of your mind while you're trying to cultivate the complete feeling of your subject. I call these inhuman beings 'Imaginary Critic'. And I find them to exist not just in the creative process, although they are boisterously loud in that particular circumstance.

And the shocking truth is, they are everywhere.

Look around. I am serious. How should you dress? How polite should you speak?

How these external inputs alter the internal workings of the mind, I wish not to explore that here. Instead, I would like to state the exact opposite: these imaginary critics shape our works and in the end produce a extraordinary contemporary piece that provides both aesthetics and functions. The argument is simple, we humanity living as a globalized and inter-weaved society develops over the decades a unique framework of aesthetic senses. These are exactly what our perception of a creative product is made of, the same for all the other fields, for example cultural values etc. We are not being new when we create. We are building on top of which that exists.

You like it or not, imaginary critics are the reasons why you keep changing your art, here and there from time to time, sometimes some minor tweaks and sometimes you simply hate what you are doing so much you throw it away.

Extrapolate that, what about everything else in life then? Should we yield to them, the picky imaginary critics?

I've come to hate my own creation! Now I know how God feels. — Homer Simpson, The Simpsons