Insight 11: When is the Audience Right?

I have been listening to people comment on my work for decades, long before I ever thought of audience response as evidence. At markets and exhibitions I have heard everything from 'my kids could do that' and 'that's too expensive' to the face people pull when they see a price, 'that's not art', 'what is it?', 'it looks like a pile of junk' and 'I would never have that in my home'. You need a reasonably thick skin if you are going to stand beside your own work and hear all of that in real time.

The interesting part is that the comments change dramatically depending on who the audience is. In the oddities world, where people are already comfortable with gothic, strange, macabre or unconventional objects, my work is usually met with enthusiasm. It sits easily in the 'this is amazing', 'beautiful' or 'spectacular' category, and people often recognise the difference in finish and quality. My work is also usually among the more expensive work in that environment, and the audience understands why.

Move into another art context and the language changes again. Some artists and curators question whether a work is too resolved, too literal, too decorative, or simply not right for their audience. Emerging artists sometimes tell me the work is too expensive and that the market will not pay for it. Friends and family are another category entirely. They usually want to be encouraging, which makes them almost useless as judges of the work, although genuinely beautiful pieces still cut through. The jellyfish are the obvious example. Almost everybody likes the jellyfish because they are beautiful.

Butterflies taught me another version of the same lesson. People loved them because they were beautiful too, but galleries generally did not want them and the oddities audience did. The jellyfish, conversely, have been embraced by galleries. So even 'people like beautiful things' is not enough information on its own. The kind of beauty, the context and the audience all matter.

Pic above: Stockyard Gallery Foster, joint exhibition January 2026.

Audience comments are not neutral evidence.

For a long time, when I needed the work to earn income, audience response and sales were effectively my most immediate measures of success. If the work sold, that mattered. If it did not, it sat with me until I found another audience. That commercial discipline taught me something I still believe strongly: making work try to fit the wrong audience opportunity rarely works. Oddities artists and buyers congregate together for a reason. Art enthusiasts, collectors, home-decor buyers, curators and people simply looking for something attractive for the wall are not interchangeable audiences.

That has become newly useful in Fragile Futures because the exhibition itself is deliberately structured into different zones, and the artworks within those zones have different jobs. I am not only interested in whether somebody says they like a work. I am interested in whether the response makes sense in relation to what that part of the exhibition was intended to do.

In the attraction zone, the responses to beauty are useful because attraction is part of the job. The Irony Specimens and jellyfish give me very clear evidence that viewers are drawn to those works. Brittle Stars complicated that picture because the audience response was much quieter, and repeated observation eventually made me question whether I had been too quick to read quietness as a lack of engagement. That became its own problem to think through rather than a simple popularity score.

Further into Fragile Futures, the responses change. Self-Made Relics produces much more direct emotional identification, and Taxonomies of Absence generates another kind of recognition around loss, material and classification. The totems surprised me because they were repeatedly endorsed as some of the strongest works in the exhibition, even though I have not sold one. The microplastics work is still largely untested, so I do not yet know how that part of the exhibition will behave with viewers.

That is where comments become more useful to me: when they are read against the job the work was meant to perform.

The guest book, overheard comments and the things people say directly to me can all contribute to that reading, but they are not votes. A comment from somebody who is already comfortable with contemporary ecological art tells me something different from the response of a person who wants an attractive object for their home. A curator considering whether work belongs in a particular program is answering a different question again. The audience fit changes what the comment can reasonably tell me.

This is also why I am wary of treating positive feedback as automatically more valuable than rejection. The wrong audience can reject a work for reasons that have very little to do with whether it is doing the job I designed it to do. Equally, the right audience can validate a direction so strongly that it becomes tempting to assume the work is resolved. Neither response removes the need for judgement.

Selling still sits uncomfortably inside this for me because I continue to regard a sale as a particularly hard form of evidence. Someone has not simply said they like the work; they have committed money to it. But even that evidence has limits. A work can sell because it is beautiful, desirable or suited to someone's home without necessarily doing the conceptual job I care about, while a large or difficult work can perform strongly in an exhibition and still return to my garage.

Fragile Futures has made that tension more obvious rather than solving it. I am balancing at least four things at once: commercial viability, the ecological message, critical or curatorial legitimacy, and my own satisfaction with the work. They do not always agree. The audience that validates one of those paths may reject another entirely.

So the useful question is no longer simply, 'What did the audience think?' It is: who was the audience, what were they encountering, what was that work meant to do, and what kind of evidence does their response actually provide?

Once I ask that, the comments become much more useful, and much less powerful.

Read more with Insight 08 — When the Quiet Work Gets Lost.

Pic below: After the Species totems - Yarra Sculpture Gallery, June 2026.