When you are giving a presentation of your work in a windowless, fanless and air-conditioningless warehouse space on a hot and humid July evening, and you have neglected to check the slides to make sure they are not backwards and sideways, and you have chosen to stoically march forward in your presentation with your backwards and sideways slides, and someone in the audience asks what could be considered a perfectly valid question under the circumstances, “What exactly is it that we’re looking at?”, please please please subdue your inner turd and fight against your natural inclination and try to respond with something, ANYTHING other than a terse and snippy “Well, that’s up to you to figure out.”

I understand that your works are abstractions. I understand that the best way to respond to such questions when working in an abstract medium is to try to guide the audience to draw their own conclusions. I’m even willing to go so far as to admit that, as your works are abstractions, the fact that the slides were both backwards and sideways did not too negatively take away from either their composition or form. But face it, your slides were backwards and sideways. Even if your slides were not backwards and sideways, it would have been desirable for you not to have responded in such a terse and snippy manner.

If you promise to make this effort, I will promise not to snort, giggle or run out of the room with a similarly affected cohort like a third grader whose teacher had just let out the loudest and wettest fart ever experienced in western civilization. As mortified as you might have felt, giving a presentation with backwards and sideways slides in a windowless, fanless and air-conditioningless warehouse, I can assure you I was equally mortified having to run out of the room like third grader.

Sincerely,

The giggling and snorting third grader who had to run out of the room.