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cimoreneFor me, at least, evaluating a work of two-dimensional representational visual art is much faster and easier than evaluating a work of fiction. This isn't to say that making it, or indeed analyzing it, is easier - it's simply due to the way you take in pictures, where a glance gives you a summary (at least if the whole thing fits within your field of view), and the longer you look, the more detail you fill in; whereas you have to read a story from beginning to end.
I could grade the artistic skill in execution of a drawing/painting from, say, 1-10 (though this would be an oversimplification because the skill evinced in a work is actually a combination of many different skills), to give a rough idea, much faster than of a story or poem - in fact, in around the amount of time that it takes to evaluate the headers on a work of fanfiction. I'm not saying that would be an extremely fair and accurate or whole representation of the value and interest inherent in that work, but I could make some progress towards categorizing a stack of pictures by skill level.
Doing that for the same number of stories would take significantly longer. Just reading 10 randomly-selected stories would probably take longer than sorting 10 randomly-selected pictures.
It's occurred to me before that some people don't notice, or can't identify, things like warped perspective or proportions or joints in the wrong places: just as some people don't notice little wrinkles in the likeness of written pastiche, like word choice or character or tone. (Or more visually, just as some people don't spot cracks or stains in a busy wallpaper or can't tell that a curtain is polyester by looking up close and touching it, two examples from our recent house-buying experience. I was completely confused by Wax and her mom disregarding these things and it turned out they both couldn't see them.)
But fanfiction can provide another instructive example, which is that we aren't all looking for the same things out of our reading material (or art). Some people consider characterization the most important part of any piece of fanfiction; other people change it on purpose, or don't care about it at all (and for most people this probably varies by fandom and character). If you look at fanart drawn by young men - and sometimes at professional comics art - you'll easily find plenty of art by people who care much more about whether a drawing depicts a character with large breasts than whether the breasts are shaped like breasts, or whether the character otherwise bears any resemblance to canon. (And within a few degrees of my social media it's easy to find skilled artists whose individual styles lean away from realism, and also to find people impressed by subject matter - say, kissing - more than by execution.)
This sounds obvious when I put it like this, but I've had this epiphany fairly recently when it comes to fanart. Something about the medium and the way I react emotionally to visual art makes it harder for me to remember it; my perceptions feel more clear-cut, self-evident, and universal than they do with reading.
I could grade the artistic skill in execution of a drawing/painting from, say, 1-10 (though this would be an oversimplification because the skill evinced in a work is actually a combination of many different skills), to give a rough idea, much faster than of a story or poem - in fact, in around the amount of time that it takes to evaluate the headers on a work of fanfiction. I'm not saying that would be an extremely fair and accurate or whole representation of the value and interest inherent in that work, but I could make some progress towards categorizing a stack of pictures by skill level.
Doing that for the same number of stories would take significantly longer. Just reading 10 randomly-selected stories would probably take longer than sorting 10 randomly-selected pictures.
It's occurred to me before that some people don't notice, or can't identify, things like warped perspective or proportions or joints in the wrong places: just as some people don't notice little wrinkles in the likeness of written pastiche, like word choice or character or tone. (Or more visually, just as some people don't spot cracks or stains in a busy wallpaper or can't tell that a curtain is polyester by looking up close and touching it, two examples from our recent house-buying experience. I was completely confused by Wax and her mom disregarding these things and it turned out they both couldn't see them.)
But fanfiction can provide another instructive example, which is that we aren't all looking for the same things out of our reading material (or art). Some people consider characterization the most important part of any piece of fanfiction; other people change it on purpose, or don't care about it at all (and for most people this probably varies by fandom and character). If you look at fanart drawn by young men - and sometimes at professional comics art - you'll easily find plenty of art by people who care much more about whether a drawing depicts a character with large breasts than whether the breasts are shaped like breasts, or whether the character otherwise bears any resemblance to canon. (And within a few degrees of my social media it's easy to find skilled artists whose individual styles lean away from realism, and also to find people impressed by subject matter - say, kissing - more than by execution.)
This sounds obvious when I put it like this, but I've had this epiphany fairly recently when it comes to fanart. Something about the medium and the way I react emotionally to visual art makes it harder for me to remember it; my perceptions feel more clear-cut, self-evident, and universal than they do with reading.
