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SCA: art and service and recognition
There are some activities in the SCA that you can take in a "service" direction or an "art" direction, or sometimes both. Scribal work (calligraphy and illumination) is an obvious area; cooking is another; others exist. Some people thrive on producing six scrolls for this weekend's event or feeding 300 people at a feast or clothing the shire for the upcoming theme event or something to that effect, and they tend to be recognized with service awards. Others are less concerned with throughput and are more interested in doing research and crafting things that are "right" and well-done, and they tend to be recognized with arts awards. Most people, of course, aren't so easily pigeon-holed and are a blend of both approaches. (It's possible to do good work quickly, after all, but it's more of a challenge.)
I find myself wondering, when considering a service-oriented person for an arts award, what the baseline quality standards ought to be. If most of the work a candidate has done is sloppy but most of that work was also done quickly, to meet a deadline, how should I weigh that? If the candidate has produced one or two high-quality pieces (to show that he can), is that enough? Is his decision to work only on the quick-and-dirty work a choice about his art, or an unfortunate effect on his art (for which he shouldn't be judged) due to a choice to serve the larger group? It would be foolish to expect everything a person produces to be top-quality, but how much high-quality work do we expect and is it mitigated by the demands of the service component?
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I'm almost the canonical example of straddling this line. I got a Silver Crescent instead a Manche, mainly (I think) because my skill level just wasn't up to snuff. I was working for the art, but at *best* all I could manage was maintenance, because I wasn't a good enough dancer myself to teach well. Then I got a Laurel for largely the same stuff, because I'd gotten (barely) to the point where I could teach effectively enough. In both cases, I think it was probably the appropriate award, based on where I was at the time...
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That's an interesting perspective. I don't know your work at the time of the Crescent well enough to comment on the Manche question, but by the time of the Laurel there was certainly (from what I saw) a feeling of both skill and propegation.
I got my Manche for diverse arts, more or less. My Laurel is for music, and it came at a time when I had made real contributions in composition/arrangement and not just performance. I think, in retrospect, that was correct; merely being a decent performer wasn't enough. I'm told that "Viking stuff" played the role of a strong minor in the discussions, but of course I'm not privy to the details. In my opinion, the work I did on Viking women's clothing wouldn't have been nearly enough; basically, I was the experimental archeologist to Thora's research, but she did the hard stuff. :-)
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Propagation, yes, but in terms of skill I was still pretty borderline. My feeling for what was and was not period was still fairly weak, and my own dance skill mediocre. Given the fact of the LoD, it was enough to push me over the line, but I'm not sure it would have been otherwise, showing the subjective nature of these things...