ABSTRACT
What is distinctive … of criticism is that it aims to discover those features of a thing that call for admiration or condemnation.… Thus there are two levels to the critic’s task, each involving the other. We ask the critic to give us, as definitely as possible … critical judgments, or evaluations of artworks as wholes. And we ask for what might be called normative explanations: calling attention to features whose presence accounts for the thing’s being better or less good than it might be or than something else is—from a certain point of view.
