ABSTRACT
Judgments of artistic merit are continually made in criticism, either directly or indirectly; and, indeed, a criticism possessed of no sort of relevance for judgments of artistic merit would hardly be considered artistically relevant at all. Judgments of artistic merit express the dry, hard approvals (or disapprovals) of artistically relevant discourse, rather than the soft, wet approvals of consumption. Legal judgments do indeed make dispositions of objects in the world. Everybody knows that judgments of merit vary among persons otherwise supposed to possess the requisite esthetic sensibility, or litmus powers; and also those persons themselves make different judgments of artistic merit in the course of their lives. The best way to understand how "artistic merit" functions are in artistically relevant criticism is through examining cases of explicit disagreement over the artistic merit of works of art. Judgments of artistic merit embody choices of direction, grounded on reasons so far only incidentally considered.
