Criticism (or lack thereof) in the fandom is something I've been thinking about for a while and could write a good chunk of text about, but I'd best keep this relatively short.
In the late 1990s, furry suffered from years of flamewars between the lifestyle and hobbyist extremes in the fandom, and, as a result, criticism became largely taboo. For a little while, the very act of complaining could get you labelled as a troublemaker. On the Furnation art discussion forum, negative criticism was outright banned. And this is a problem - negative criticism is occasionally justified (e.g., satire, although I find positive criticism works better) - and it didn't help that most of the complainers were being a**holes. Yet if criticism is taboo, how do conflicts and differences in the fandom get addressed?
This is something for which there's no easy answer. By 2000 the strategy most people were using in the fandom was to avoid controversial topics as much as possible. That's why when mass furry trolling started happening in the early 2000s, we were such wonderful targets - we weren't emotionally or psychologically able to cope with criticism, and it highlighted just how unwilling we were to criticize each other. People outside the fandom were more than happy to do it for us, and our reaction was to circle our wagons and give each other group hugs, instead of addressing things. Now that it's 2011 I'm seeing more willingness within the fandom to discuss sensitive topics, but it's going very slowly.
Another problem with trolling is that although there's an occasional valid point on sites like Vivisector, they're buried, obscured and surrounded by inflammatory attacks, so you question the motives of the poster, and correspondingly the argument. Other criticisms in the fandom tend to be along the lines of "I don't like X". While a valid statement (and something I'm not immune to), it's not exactly helpful. On the issues where we're divided, we rarely get a mature, non-inflammatory discussion along the lines of "Given that so many X don't like Y and are unlikely to change their opinions, how can we all get along better?"
And most of all, nuanced, serious criticism is very rare. It's something I've tried to accomplish in my reviews for Anthrozine, although I'm not sure if that site will be ongoing. This criticism problem goes back years and years - check out this archived essay by Watts Martin. And writing good criticism is hard. It takes work, and now that there's a lot of younger people in the fandom, it's become even trickier - both to create quality criticism and to be able to take it. These skills take time and practice to develop.
Sorry I can't talk much about the art end of things as your post was largely addressing. I'm not much for academic artistic criticism in that someone tries to apply meaning to art that was never there - but I'm interested in identifying and deconstructing patterns, in a tvtropes sort of way. On the depiction of the body, I highly recommend the opening chapters of John Berger's book, Ways of Seeing, or episode 2 of the tv series (starts off slow, but stay with it).
Criticism (or lack thereof) in the fandom is something I've been thinking about for a while and could write a good chunk of text about, but I'd best keep this relatively short.
In the late 1990s, furry suffered from years of flamewars between the lifestyle and hobbyist extremes in the fandom, and, as a result, criticism became largely taboo. For a little while, the very act of complaining could get you labelled as a troublemaker. On the Furnation art discussion forum, negative criticism was outright banned. And this is a problem - negative criticism is occasionally justified (e.g., satire, although I find positive criticism works better) - and it didn't help that most of the complainers were being a**holes. Yet if criticism is taboo, how do conflicts and differences in the fandom get addressed?
This is something for which there's no easy answer. By 2000 the strategy most people were using in the fandom was to avoid controversial topics as much as possible. That's why when mass furry trolling started happening in the early 2000s, we were such wonderful targets - we weren't emotionally or psychologically able to cope with criticism, and it highlighted just how unwilling we were to criticize each other. People outside the fandom were more than happy to do it for us, and our reaction was to circle our wagons and give each other group hugs, instead of addressing things. Now that it's 2011 I'm seeing more willingness within the fandom to discuss sensitive topics, but it's going very slowly.
Another problem with trolling is that although there's an occasional valid point on sites like Vivisector, they're buried, obscured and surrounded by inflammatory attacks, so you question the motives of the poster, and correspondingly the argument. Other criticisms in the fandom tend to be along the lines of "I don't like X". While a valid statement (and something I'm not immune to), it's not exactly helpful. On the issues where we're divided, we rarely get a mature, non-inflammatory discussion along the lines of "Given that so many X don't like Y and are unlikely to change their opinions, how can we all get along better?"
And most of all, nuanced, serious criticism is very rare. It's something I've tried to accomplish in my reviews for Anthrozine, although I'm not sure if that site will be ongoing. This criticism problem goes back years and years - check out this archived essay by Watts Martin. And writing good criticism is hard. It takes work, and now that there's a lot of younger people in the fandom, it's become even trickier - both to create quality criticism and to be able to take it. These skills take time and practice to develop.
Sorry I can't talk much about the art end of things as your post was largely addressing. I'm not much for academic artistic criticism in that someone tries to apply meaning to art that was never there - but I'm interested in identifying and deconstructing patterns, in a tvtropes sort of way. On the depiction of the body, I highly recommend the opening chapters of John Berger's book, Ways of Seeing, or episode 2 of the tv series (starts off slow, but stay with it).