Your art teacher’s critique isn’t about you being good or bad. It’s about the next piece being better.

Critique is aimed at the object, not at your worth, even if it lands in the same place for a moment. A teacher saying a composition is crowded is telling you something about the next piece, which is the only piece anybody can still affect. Reading it as a grade on you turns useful information into something you start avoiding. Good notes are a form of attention.

After the next critique, write down two things you were told without arguing in the margins. Apply one of them to your very next piece while it is fresh. Ask afterwards whether you got it right.