It does sound a little defensive, though one understands the impulse. When Duke Ellington composed “The Queen’s Suite,” he was working from the blank page; he brought a previously unimagined musical offering into the world. Orwell’s hack, by contrast, produces his review by standing shakily on other works. Critics justifying their trade like to say that the judgment aspect of the job—the thumbs-up or thumbs-down—is the least interesting part: really, they just love movies or whatever it is they review. This sounds a little like a butcher claiming to have gone into the meat-slicing business because he likes working with animals. It is possible to honor and enjoy new work without grading and dissecting it. That is how many people live.

Scott recalls that he faced accusations of bad faith in writing about “The Avengers,” in the spring of 2012. He didn’t hate the movie, but he was irked by what he saw as its overprocessed, profit-seeking slickness. When the review appeared, Samuel L. Jackson, one of the film’s many stars, singled him out on Twitter (“AO Scott needs a new job! . . . One he can ACTUALLY do!”), and fans piled on. “The Avengers” went on to be one of the fastest movies ever to gross a billion dollars.

What valuable function did Scott’s review serve in this case? It certainly didn’t talk moviegoers out of seeing or enjoying the film. It didn’t persuade the film’s producers to change course. (There was a sequel.) What such reviews do, he suggests in his book, is to contribute to a climate in which creative work is taken seriously, and thus dignified as a pursuit. “It is my contention here that criticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood; that criticism, properly understood, is not an enemy from which art must be defended, but rather another name—the proper name—for the defense of art itself,” he writes. Criticism sets a standard that artists can strive for or resist, he says, echoing an old defense by the poet-critic Matthew Arnold. According to Scott, “A work of art is itself a piece of criticism.”

Criticism is art; art is criticism. A critic might point out that neither term means much without a good definition. The short-form book reviewing that Michiko Kakutani does at the Times has a purpose different from that of Alfred Kazin’s historical arguments in “On Native Grounds” or of William K. Wimsatt’s scholarly work on Samuel Johnson’s prose. Yet all these pursuits are known as criticism, and Scott approaches such genres largely indiscriminately. His sense of “art,” which would seem to include everything from Marina Abramović to “WALL-E,” assumes a gaping straddle, too. The challenge facing “Better Living Through Criticism” is not just to defend his craft’s strengths but to define its limits.

Scott is qualified for this task. He was brought up by two humanities professors, and he was a book critic before taking his film-reviewing job at the Times. He has an easy, avid knowledge of the Western canon; his book scarcely addresses movies, and occasionally reads like fragments from lectures delivered at one of our great universities. (Scott has taught at Wesleyan.) “Better Living Through Criticism” is clearly a labor of love from someone who thinks deeply about his work and wants to pass along the flame. That said, it’s a mess of a book, fuzzy, disorganized, and maddeningly undirected. Scott presents himself as a warrior against naysayers, but his central claim—that adept critics strengthen the culture of art—isn’t actually contentious. What’s subject to debate is more specific: who’s adept, where these people get their taste, and why we trust that they will lead us through a landscape we can’t see.

Beyond institutional affiliation, critics usually gain authority in three ways. They can be first responders: if they called the genius of Patti Smith before she was Patti Smith, their taste in other new music is probably of note. They can be scholars: someone who knows the canon backward and forward seems a sound gatekeeper for esteem. Or they can be seducers: they’ve wooed and won you with their work; you follow them because you like the way they think. The trouble is that each virtue is unreliable, and almost nobody fully embodies all three. We give critics broad mandates, and they’re constantly betraying our trust.

A major problem is the steep, shadowy presence of posterity. People arrive in history at once late and early; they rely on critics to help them see beyond their time. We can be grateful for the first responder who says that an unknown artist is going places—that critic’s gift is to cast out ahead of her era. We can defer to the scholar who suggests that J. K. Rowling is no C. S. Lewis. Yet reviewing also reflects an era’s biases and blindnesses; even food writers’ tastes shift with the times. (One wonders what Craig Claiborne, the postwar Times critic with a soft spot for foreign fare and fried chicken, would have made of upstate kale and melon foam.) Reviewers are supposed to give us bird’s-eye guidance, but they, too, live within the garden maze.

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And so the history of criticism, as Scott notices, is filled with bad verdicts. “It is impossible to enumerate all the important literary works which were ignored, jeered at, or savagely slashed by critics in the nineteenth century, ‘the age of criticism,’ ” the Yale French professor Henri Peyre observed, in a delightful diatribe from 1944. When “Moby-Dick” came out, it was called “trash.” Jane Austen went largely unnoticed, and, in 1857, a reviewer at Le Figaro bluntly dismissed a début novelist: “M. Flaubert n’est pas un écrivain” (“Flaubert is not a writer”). The book under review was “Madame Bovary.” Take a look, Peyre wrote, and you will find that criticism has rarely accomplished even its most basic mission of identifying and supporting important work. “Keats was not killed by a few venomous reviews; but is it unreasonable to suppose that a little more recognition would have encouraged him to write more poetry in the last year of his life?” he asks. Why persist in such a cruel pursuit with such bad odds?

Peyre was obviously being selective. Our beatitudinal myth of posterity—blessed are the unknown geniuses, for they shall be super-famous after they die—is a canard. We like to hear that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Zora Neale Hurston were buried in unmarked graves, but Mozart was celebrated all his life, and Hurston was on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, the mainstay of her era’s newsstand. Criticism, for that matter, can sin in generosity as well. In 1959, Elizabeth Hardwick published a famous broadside in Harper’s lamenting treacly book reviews. “A genius may indeed go to his grave unread, but he will hardly have gone to it unpraised,” she wrote. “A universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns.”

Hardwick was pushing back against complaints from the Romantics and their sympathizers, such as Peyre, who might have bridled at her harshness but who shared her feeling that something was fishy in the business of reviewing. Career critics are siloed, Peyre pointed out. They’re led alone into hermetic rooms; fed a stream of new work, to be digested cold; and told to publish whatever they happen to think, a role that sets them up to look ridiculous. Overworked, Orwellian reviewers were not necessarily wrong to hate themselves, but the problem was endemic; it emerged from the professionalization of the reviewer job. Peyre’s solution was to bring in academics. He imagined reviewers and the professoriat joining forces and elevating each other in their voices and their knowledge. His ambitions were vast; revisiting the topic in the late sixties, he imagined literary reviews funded in the manner of space research. “The benefit to American culture, to American prestige, and—the word is not too big—to mankind would be immense,” he wrote. Confoundingly, the funds have yet to arrive. For now, the job of criticism still sits on earth, with all its imperfections.