"Opinions are like arseholes"

There's something I need to come clean about: when I first started wrestling, I would go online and read reviews of my matches -

I hang my head at my naivety.

Before I continue, I want to make it clear, I'm going to try and write this in the most positive and least preachy way possible; people get angry when you question their opinions.

That's probably the best place to begin: opinions. Some people like to say "opinons are like arseholes, everyone's got one." Now, that's a perfectly valid statement, if not also a backhanded way of insulting people with an opinion you don't approve of. (It's also incredibly overused by people who're trying to be witty.) If you expose yourself to people's opinions of you, or your work, or even the work of others, that you enjoy, then you open yourself up to the experiencing of the negative opinion - the most feared of all opinions. However, you're also potentially going to run into the positive opinion - that oh, so friendly form. The reading of reviews is the game risk, reward that a lot of people play. It also gives rise to the artistic double standard.

Without trying to sound too pretentious, I like to think of what I do as an art form. There is skill involved, but that's not why it's art. To me, art is an expression of being. That's a very basic definition, but it's also going to be the one I'm sticking with for this post; any further elaboration of art and there are the equal dangers of turning this into a dissertation and becoming far more pretentious than a part-time pro wrestler has the right to be. Back to the matter at hand, I think that there is some art in what I do. As an artist, I have an audience, and audiences respond to the art. How people deal with that response, typically, is the double standard: if someone thinks you're good, then you consent to their opinion being valid, and receive an ego boost; if someone thinks you're bad, then they don't know what they're talking about, and you'll probably say something along the lines of "opinions are like arseholes-".

There's a horrible double standard in wrestling where people pick and choose whose opinions are valid, and whose are not, based solely upon how pleasant that person is, with regards to them. I was very guilty of this for quite a few years. Luckily, I'm weird, and my pondering time is spent with such vital questions like "what is a critic and why are they valid?" You can get into long and labourious lines of questioning regarding aesthetics, but really it's a question of skill.

Like I said, skill, alone, does not constitute an art form, but wrestling does require certain skills, regardless. If you are unfamiliar with the skills required, then you are in no position to judge them. You take your car to a mechanic for his opinion on how to fix it, because he has the skills to properly assess the situation; why are artistic forms, which take skill, any different? To me, they aren't. My favourite analogy is this:

"Imagine you're arguing against someone in a foreign language, when all you have is a basic phrase book and the other person is a native speaker."

So I don't read reviews, good or bad, because - and this is the part where you  must remember, I'm just being honest - their opinions don't matter. I care if people are entertained, I care if people feel they got their money's worth, but I can tell these things by the immediate reactions at the shows. I don't care how people theorise that I could improve my skills, nor do I believe them when they try to explain my positive attributes. I probably sound like a right moody git, but you've got to concede, I have a consistent approach.