(no subject)

[ppfuf]

A link, gakked from this is an excellent piece on how difficult artistic criticism is
Read it first.
Screenwriter Josh Olson has summed up exactly why I hate judging sca competitions. He's also summed up the parts of my job that I hate too.

Comments

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the A&S Coronet competition I attended in the Far West. The populace did the judging; while I was scoring by comparison to central kingdom Laurel work I'd seen, the others were apparently going predominantly by "OOH, pretty!" Need I add that my scores across the board were rather substantially lower than theirs? There was grumbling.

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Interesting read. I don't judge competitions, either, because of the kicked-puppy look I got from the non-winners. And then one of them wanted to argue with me. Submitted had been three pages of documentation on a fairly obscure art form.

Me: You documented your methods and so on, but did not document the existence of Item X during the middle ages. Did they have Xs in the first place?
Them: But they had Xs! Lots of Xs! I can go get you some documentation!
Me: If it wasn't in your submitted documentation, how is a judge supposed to know they had lots of Xs?

[ppfuf.livejournal.com]

"But they had Xs!" Ha. That's the basis of every cordial *documentation* I've ever read. Sadly, people in the middle ages did not create every possible permutation of the materials they had available.
Someday, future re-enactors will be saying we must have eaten dogs, after all, there's so many of them in the early 21st century.

[ppfuf.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off with anonymous judging in a case like that.
But I understand your point; it's so aggravating when the shinny object wins over the perfectly historical one.

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

The judging was at least nominally anonymous - no names on the score sheets, and there may not have been any on the entries (though there was no particular attempt at secrecy in setting things out.) At this remove I don't recall whether they specifically IDed me as the source of the low scores, but there was certainly grumbling about having such low scores submitted.

There was, however, nothing even remotely approaching "perfectly historical". Documentation ranged from pathetic to non-existent. Apparently, though, no one knew any better.