Art criticism may be defined as the process of judging the aesthetic qualities of visual art, chiefly painting, sculpture, and architecture, but also including craft objects. This has become a specialized field in the modern era, but judgments and criticisms about works of art have appeared since ancient times in descriptive and poetic writings, histories, technical treatises on art, and philosophical discussions of aesthetics.

In the Western world, reflection on art began with the philosophers of ancient Greece. Plato discussed proportion as the source of beauty, and mimesis, or imitation, as the primary mode of art. Aristotle identified different kinds of imitation, and Xenocrates wrote several technical treatises on painting and sculpture discussing the ideal synthesis of proportion and imitation in terms of the lives of classical Greek artists. Later, in the 3rd century AD, Plotinus combined mysticism and Neoplatonism to give images a divine source and interpretation. This, together with the Byzantine use of light and color to evoke spiritual transcendence, underlay the symbolic, allegorical, and decorative character of medieval Christian art.

The Italian renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries reinstated classical mimesis as the basis of art. Leonardo da Vinci wrote that painting brings the senses together with reason and mathematics in a scientific practice. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550), on the other hand, emphasized artistic personalities and technical progress as the measure of art, the pinnacle of which he saw in the genius of Michelangelo. Vasari's concept of genius was Neoplatonic, holding that the inspired artist creates earthly beauty as a reflection of the "Absolute." This aesthetic ideal characterized the Baroque art and architecture of the 17th century. In the mid-18th century a rationalist tendency toward order and restraint combined with interest generated by the excavation of Roman remains inspired a Neoclassicism that emphasized fidelity to Greek and Roman models. Art history, museums, and the first regular public exhibitions of art also had their origin in the 18th century. Reviews of these exhibitions, such as those by Denis Diderot, began art criticism as it is now known.

By the early 19th century, Romanticism, a reaction against neoclassical strictures, had taken root across Europe. In England landscape painting and Gothic revival architecture explored the "Sublime," an exalted feeling embodied in the awesome and even horrific aspect of nature. Meanwhile, in Germany, the idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel transcended the revivalist history of neoclassicism with his dialectical history of art, which has been of singular importance in the subsequent development of art history and theory. For Hegel, the classical sculptors had achieved a perfect balance between idea and material, but in romantic art the idea predominates over the material, allowing the artist to seek the revelation of Spirit. In France, Eugene Delacroix challenged the neoclassical doctrines upheld by the Academie des Beaux Arts with his romantic paintings, and was championed in the critical writings of Charles Baudelaire, who placed the highest value on the faculty of imagination. Other French artists espoused Realism, creating socially critical images of both the urban and peasant life of their own times and rejecting classical and allegorical subjects. Many others, in France and elsewhere, came to believe in art for art's sake. In the second half of the century, the impressionists and post-impressionists, rejected by the artistic establishment, formed the modernist avant-garde, which became the dominant influence in 20th-century art.

In recent times art has become a frequent subject in philosophical theories of knowledge while generating a broad range of new critical viewpoints.  Freudian psychology and phenomenological theories of intentionality have recast ideas of the subjective experience of both artist and viewer, and suggest new levels of meaning and new forms of art. Another pervasive idea is that art constitutes a mode of experience similar to language in its operation. Formalist criticism develops this notion, advancing through its defense of abstract painting and sculpture. Notable formalist critics such as Clive Bell and Clement Greenberg have argued for the significance of the artistic elements of form, such as color, line, shape and composition, and have contended that representational content is secondary, even distracting. Attacking formalism as rarified and socially unresponsive, a Marxist criticism of art has become increasingly influential through the writings of such theorists as Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. 

Contemporary Marxist criticism attempts to go beyond the sociological critiques explored in the 19th century to try and understand the dialectical interactions of artistic form, the conditions of its production, and the interpretation of content, very often employing the methods of structural linguistics and anthropology. A widespread critical attitude in the 1980s was that the oppositional role of the modernist avant-garde is over, leading to the current eclectic condition designated postmodernism. Recent theories of poststructuralism and interpretation theory propose strategies of critical evaluation that incorporate multiple viewpoints and accept a basic indeterminacy in meaning.