First, let me confess; I can be slightly nit-picking, and even a bit obsessive. Pedantic would be a criticism which I might be inclined to accept. So I know that I have a capacity to rush in where others may fear to tread. On the other hand, I remember an exchange on the forum, where a contributor (that talented watercolourist, Alan Owen) doubted that comments on work posted could be honest - others disagreed. And I wondered.... If I don't actually like a work, or think I have nothing useful to say about it, I won't comment at all. But presuming that no one would post any work if they didn't want some independent assessment of it - in which I may of course be quite mistaken - I have from time to time ventured on some, usually fairly mild, criticism, of the sort I would value myself. On one occasion, I did get a bit silly (sorry Matthew!), and niggled, irritatingly. On the whole, however, I believe I've managed to balance any suggestion with positive comment, because after all I wouldn't comment at all if I felt the work was hopeless, beyond any possibility of improvement, or, in short, b. awful. Normally, I have got away with this. No one is compelled to agree with any critic, and that's taken as read so far as I'm concerned. Anything anyone has to say on others' work is only an opinion - it may be a well-informed one, or it may just be that in peering at a representation on screen, one hasn't really given the work a fair chance. Either way, if you post your work on a website, you have to be prepared to take the rough with the smooth - and if you're so hyper-sensitive that the only comment you want is saccharine praise, it's a bit hard to see why you bother to post in the first place. I shall not name the artist concerned, but a comment I made in the last couple of days brought forth a reaction that would have been a bit over the top if it had come from Damien Hirst in response to the excoriating comments on his last exhibition. It wasn't abusive, or even insulting - it was, however, peevish; and self-defensive to an absurd degree . And it means that I shan't comment on his work again, which is a small pity, because on the whole I like it. Why would this matter a bit? It probably doesn't, much. But - if a site turns into a mutual congratulation society, it rapidly ceases to have anything to offer those of us who are trying to improve our work by exposing it to view. I'm not a great admirer of the largely American trend to "critique" work, because it has long seemed to me that this is a practice tending to insist on negative comment in the name of balance; and I have no interest in just pulling people's work apart and analysing it brush stroke by brush stroke. Yet, one might like a work in general but think it spoiled by a lack of attention to detail - however you choose to define "detail". Do you heap praise on it, concentrating on the beam in your own eye rather than on the mote in another's? No, I think. A criticism may be fair or unfair, right or wrong, worth making or not; far be it from me to suggest that artists who post work and then get precious about comments might think about why they're here; or even, just get over themselves.... In the interests of this site in general, however, it seems to me that we have all the protection we need for our finer feelings in the freedom to remove comments we don't like or think blatantly unreasonable. But if all some of us want is appreciation - then what's the point of the gallery's comment facility? If that were all that the site offered, then so far as I'm concerned it would have no value. So I shall continue to offer support to other artists, in the best way I know how - which is to suggest areas of weakness while admiring strengths, when that's appropriate - but file one of our colleagues as too, shall we say, sensitive for such an approach. Which seems to me a pity, and not what the site ought to be about.... I wish him a Happy Christmas, anyway; I shall admire his work in secret henceforth (or not, as the case may be); and will hope that my expectations of this website are generally shared, so that we can be honest about each other's work. Because if we can't, then a point made by Jenet Peers in one of the forums, which boiled down to a concern that it might be too cosy, would be truer than I supposed.