This is made in

This is Aesthetics Bites, a series for philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds

Aesthetics Bites is made in association with the London Aesthetics Forum and made possible by a grant from the British Society of Aesthetics.

Alongside the artist there's the critic. There are critics and reviewers of dance, theatre, art, film and so on.

But what is the role of the critic's role, and in particular is part of the critic's role to evaluate works of art.

Noel Carroll of the City University of New York evaluate works of art. Noel

Noel of the City University of New York thinks it is.

Noel, welcome to Aesthetics Spites.

Glad to be here.

The topic we're going to focus on today is criticism. Why are you interested

in criticism now? What's special about criticism? At present there's a kind of

crisis amongst critics.

A recent poll by Columbia University registered skepticism about the process of making evaluation.

I think of criticism as being essentially a matter of evaluation. I think of criticism as being essentially a matter of evaluation, whereas a number

of practicing art critics today, in fact a majority, think of evaluation as the least important

thing that they do.

For them, the important thing they do

is to explain the context of the work,

the ideas in the work, to come up

with interpretations of the work,

but they don't feel that criticism is important. I on the

other hand want to argue that criticism though it of course it involves things

...