Beneath surface aesthetics lie the layers that matter most to criticism: intention, technique, and the cultural context a work was made within.
Responding to a work is immediate and largely involuntary. Criticism begins one step later, when one asks what produced the response — and whether the effect was engineered, inherited, or accidental.
Intention
Intention is neither the final word nor safely ignorable. A work can fail at what it set out to do and succeed at something else entirely, but that judgment is unavailable to anyone who never asked what it was attempting.
Technique
Technique is the most teachable layer and the most frequently mistaken for the whole. Facility is not the same as achievement — though achievement without facility is rarer than the romantic account of art suggests.
The eye sees quickly. Understanding what it saw takes considerably longer.
