>>111117798>they're appealing to their own value over the works they are criticizingNot really. They're appealing to their own ability to discern the elements that make a work good and bad, and communicate that to other people, so they know whether to put their actual money behind it. They don't even have to be positing that their own ability to do this is better than the artists they're assessing, though it might be, just that the artist failed to achieve what they wanted to. Before the age of the internet, when opinions became a dime a dozen, and everyone was publishing theirs, this was a valuable service. It may still be, given the kind of illiterate garbage you find in user reviews.
