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| 1. | the act of passing judgment as to the merits of anything. |
| 2. | the act of passing severe judgment; censure; faultfinding. |
| 3. | the act or art of analyzing and evaluating or judging the quality of a literary or artistic work, musical performance, art exhibit, dramatic production, etc. |
| 4. | a critical comment, article, or essay; critique. |
| 5. | any of various methods of studying texts or documents for the purpose of dating or reconstructing them, evaluating their authenticity, analyzing their content or style, etc.: historical criticism; literary criticism. |
| 6. | investigation of the text, origin, etc., of literary documents, esp. Biblical ones: textual criticism. |
criticism
the analysis and evaluation of works of art. More subtly, art criticism is often tied to theory; it is interpretive, involving the effort to understand a particular work of art from a theoretical perspective and to establish its significance in the history of art.
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