Criticizing Art

Chapter 3, “Describing Art,” was a great synopsis of how to look at and analyze works of art. It begins with a introduction about how art critics aim to convey a description of the piece of art itself without a necessarily negative connotation attached to it. I think that this is a good idea to be reminded of because my general impression of art critics is generally, well, negative.
However, maybe they have a harder job then I would give them credit for. Art critics can state the facts about a painting: its size, the media or mediums that it was created with, the form …etc; these are all finite features. What happens after that seems to be a great deal of guess work, and hopefully educated guesswork. Hard as they try to understand the content of the work, they can never really know what its main intention is (and to further the point, does even the artist know what the main intention of his or work is all the time).
What it seems to me is that, in this unclear process of deciphering art, where we do not have the strongholds of the finite to stand upon, our emotions inevitably come into play, and I don’t think that it can be helped. I know when I look at a piece of work, no matter what it is, I tend to feel something, which seems to be automatic. That split second of immediate face value is my initial emotion, and it comes out even before I ask it to. If I can’t stop my own feelings about a piece of art to surface, why should I expect the art critics to do the same?