I want to tell you about the first time I read a magic product review that genuinely surprised me. Not because the review was insightful or well-written. Because it was positive. About everything. Every single product in the issue received a glowing recommendation. The language varied slightly — “highly recommended,” “a must-have,” “brilliant construction,” “one of the best releases this year” — but the conclusion was always the same. Everything was great. Everything was worth buying. Everything was a contribution to the art.
I remember thinking: this cannot possibly be accurate. In every other field I have encountered — business books, restaurant reviews, film criticism, software products, strategy frameworks — the distribution of quality follows a curve. Some things are excellent. Most things are adequate. Some things are poor. That is the nature of creative output. Not everything can be outstanding.
But in magic, apparently, it can.
That was my introduction to the cheering section problem, and in the years since, I have come to believe it is one of the most damaging dynamics in the magic community. Not because cheerful positivity is inherently wrong. But because a community that cannot or will not offer honest critique is a community that has given up on improvement.
The Echo Chamber
I want to be fair about where this comes from. The magic community is small. Performers know each other. Reviewers know the creators whose products they review. Convention speakers know the people sitting in the audience. The social incentives all point in one direction: be nice.
And there are good reasons to be nice. Magic is a niche art form. The community sustains itself through shared enthusiasm. When someone releases a new product or performs a new routine, the impulse to celebrate that effort is genuine and well-intentioned. These people are doing creative work in an art form they love, often without financial reward, and the community wants to support that.
I respect this. I understand the impulse. And I think it is slowly killing the craft.
Ken Weber makes this point with characteristic directness in Maximum Entertainment. He describes the magic community’s relationship with critique as fundamentally broken. The PEA — the Psychic Entertainers Association — ran workshops where Weber would publicly critique fellow performers’ acts. Real critique. Specific observations about what was not working and why. Not to humiliate anyone, but to provide the kind of honest assessment that performers cannot get anywhere else in the magic world.
These workshops were apparently both valuable and controversial. Valuable because the performers who subjected themselves to genuine critique improved dramatically. Controversial because the culture of the magic community resists that kind of honesty. The expectation is support. The expectation is encouragement. The expectation is that we tell each other we are doing great work, even when we are not.
The Problem with Universal Praise
Here is what universal praise actually communicates to a performer: nothing.
When everything is described as “great” and “amazing” and “brilliant,” the words lose their meaning. If my latest routine is “amazing” and so is the routine I performed last year and so is the routine that performer across the room performed and so is every product in the magazine, then “amazing” is just the baseline. It tells me nothing about where I stand, what I am doing well, or what I need to improve.
Imagine running a business where every quarterly review said “exceeds expectations.” For everyone. Every quarter. The high performers would have no idea they were high performers. The struggling team members would have no idea they were struggling. Everyone would assume they were doing fine, and the organization would have no mechanism for improvement.
This is exactly what happens in the magic community. Performers who are genuinely outstanding receive the same praise as performers who are mediocre. Products that represent real innovation receive the same review scores as products that are derivative and unoriginal. The signal is lost in the noise of universal positivity.
I experienced this personally at a magic convention in Europe, about three years into my journey. I performed a short set during an open session and received warm applause and several compliments afterward. “Great set.” “Really enjoyed it.” “Your card work was impressive.” I left feeling good about myself.
A few weeks later, I watched the recording. The set was rough. My transitions were sloppy. My pacing was uneven. The opening routine ran too long and the closing routine was rushed. These were real, fixable problems — the kind that a single honest observation from anyone in that convention hall could have pointed me toward. Instead, I got generalized praise that told me nothing and reinforced the false belief that I was further along than I actually was.
Nobody was lying to me. Nobody was being malicious. They were being polite. And politeness, in this context, was the enemy of my growth.
Why Other Art Forms Have Real Criticism
Think about how other performance disciplines handle critique.
In theatre, every production is reviewed by critics who have no social obligation to the performers. The reviews are published, they are specific, and they range from enthusiastic to devastating. A playwright whose new work receives a negative review from a respected critic has received something painful but valuable: an honest assessment from a trained observer who is evaluating the work on its merits, not on the playwright’s feelings.
In music, the same dynamic exists. Albums are reviewed. Concerts are reviewed. The reviews are published in outlets that the musicians and their audiences both read. A musician knows where they stand because the critical ecosystem tells them. Not every review is right. Not every critic is fair. But the system generates information, and information is the raw material of improvement.
In stand-up comedy, the feedback is even more immediate and brutal. If a joke does not work, the audience does not laugh. There is no polite applause for a punchline that falls flat. The comedian knows, in real time, exactly where the material stands. Ralphie May, whose masterclass I studied while exploring the intersection of comedy and magic, talked about this dynamic extensively. He viewed bombing not as failure but as education. “You can learn more from bombing than you can from killing,” he said. The willingness to bomb — and to learn from bombing — is built into comedy’s culture.
Magic has none of this. Magic audiences are conditioned to applaud. Magic reviewers are conditioned to praise. Magic communities are conditioned to support. The result is an environment where honest feedback is so rare that when it does appear, it feels like an attack rather than a gift.
The PEA Model
What Weber built with the PEA workshops was an attempt to create a space where honest critique was normal. Where performers could present their material, receive specific and sometimes uncomfortable feedback, and use that feedback to improve.
The key word is “normal.” In most artistic disciplines, critique is a normal part of the creative process. In theatre, the director gives notes after every rehearsal. In music, the conductor marks problem passages. In writing, the editor marks the weak sections. Critique is not an event. It is not an occasion. It is the ambient condition in which creative work happens.
In magic, critique is an event. When it happens at all, it is treated as unusual, potentially hurtful, and requiring extensive social negotiation. “Can I give you some feedback?” becomes a loaded question, because the community norm is to not give feedback — or rather, to give only positive feedback, which is the same as not giving feedback at all.
Weber’s workshops worked precisely because they established critique as the expected norm within that particular space. Everyone who attended knew what was coming. Everyone had agreed to subject themselves to honest assessment. The social contract was explicit: we are here to get better, and getting better requires hearing things we might not want to hear.
I wish this model were more widespread. I wish every magic convention included a session where performers could present their material and receive genuine, specific feedback from experienced observers. Not the kind of session where everyone says “that was really nice” and means “I do not want to hurt your feelings.” The kind of session where someone says “your second routine does not justify its length — you have two minutes of setup for thirty seconds of payoff, and the audience’s attention is drifting during the setup.”
That feedback might sting. But it is the kind of feedback that leads to a better second routine.
The Advertiser Problem
There is a structural dimension to this that is worth acknowledging. Magic magazines and review platforms exist in a small market. The creators and dealers who make the products being reviewed are often the same people who advertise in those publications. The financial incentive to publish negative reviews is essentially zero.
I am not accusing anyone of corruption. I think most reviewers in the magic world genuinely believe they are being fair and helpful. But the structural incentives push in one direction: toward positivity. A reviewer who consistently publishes critical reviews will lose access to review copies. A publication that regularly runs negative reviews will lose advertisers. The ecosystem is too small and too interconnected for genuine independence.
This is not unique to magic. Film criticism has the same tension with studio advertising. Book criticism has the same tension with publisher relationships. But in those larger fields, the sheer number of publications creates space for independence. There are critics who do not depend on access, reviewers who do not depend on advertising relationships. The ecosystem is large enough to support honest voices.
Magic’s ecosystem is not. And so the cheering section persists.
What This Means for Self-Direction
If you are waiting for the magic community to give you honest feedback on your work, you will wait a very long time. The culture is not designed for it. The social incentives oppose it. The structural dynamics prevent it.
This is why becoming your own director is not optional. It is the only reliable path to honest assessment.
You cannot outsource your growth to a community that is constitutionally unable to tell you what you need to hear. You cannot rely on convention audiences who will applaud anything. You cannot trust reviews that praise everything. You have to develop the internal capacity to observe your own work with the same specificity and honesty that a good director or a good critic would bring.
This is harder than it sounds. It requires watching recordings of yourself with the same critical eye you would bring to someone else’s performance. It requires asking “what is not working?” before you ask “what is working?” It requires resisting the gravitational pull of your own ego, which wants you to believe that the positive feedback is accurate and the negative feedback is an anomaly.
It also requires, when you do find someone who is willing to be honest with you, treating that honesty as the gift it is. Not getting defensive. Not explaining why the weak moment was actually intentional. Not dismissing the observation because the observer “doesn’t understand what I was going for.” Listening, documenting, and evaluating with an open mind.
Building Your Own Critical Infrastructure
Since I cannot rely on the broader magic community for honest critique, I have built my own small infrastructure for it.
I have two trusted people — neither of them magicians — who watch my performances regularly and give me specific, unfiltered feedback. One is a friend from the business world who has no interest in how the effects work but has a sharp eye for presentation, pacing, and audience engagement. The other is someone who attends corporate events frequently and can tell me how my performance compares to other entertainers and speakers in similar settings.
Neither of them is a magic expert. That is actually an advantage. They watch the way the audience watches. They do not see the technical execution. They see the experience. And when the experience has weak spots, they tell me, because we have an explicit agreement that honest feedback is what I am asking for.
This is a small-scale version of what Weber built with the PEA workshops. A defined space where critique is the expectation, not the exception. Where the social contract includes honesty. Where the goal is improvement, not comfort.
I also use video relentlessly. The camera does not care about my feelings. It does not applaud out of politeness. It shows me exactly what the audience saw, and it does so without the softening filter of social obligation. When the recording shows a dead spot, there is no one to explain it away. There is only the evidence and the question: what am I going to do about it?
The Courage to Disagree with the Cheering Section
The hardest moment in my development as a self-directed performer came when I had to disagree with positive feedback. A show in Innsbruck. Standing ovation at the end. Multiple people told me afterward it was the best magic they had seen. I went back to my hotel room glowing.
Then I watched the recording.
The show was not the best magic anyone had seen. The show had a sagging middle section, a transition that was visibly awkward, and a closing routine that succeeded more because of the music and the lighting than because of my performance. The standing ovation was real. The audience’s enjoyment was real. But the performance had significant room for improvement that no one in the audience — and no one in my magic community — was going to tell me about.
I had to choose: believe the cheering section, or believe the recording. I chose the recording.
That choice, repeated over dozens of performances, is what self-direction is. It is the willingness to see clearly when everyone around you is telling you the view is beautiful. The view might be beautiful. But the road to the summit is long, and you will not find it by standing still and accepting compliments.
The cheering section means well. But the cheering section will not make you better. Only the truth will do that, and in magic, the truth is something you mostly have to find on your own.