Obsessives and dilettantes, omnivores and geeks, highbrow and low, we are more likely to seek affirmation than challenge. Some people love opera. Others love hip-hop. Quite a few are interested in both. “It’s all good!” you might say. But you don’t believe that, any more than I do. Some of it is terrible. There is, axiomatically, no disputing taste, and also no accounting for it.

And yet our ways of thinking about this fundamental human attribute amount to a heap of contradictions. There is no argument, but then again there is only argument. We grant that our preferences are subjective, but we’re rarely content to leave them in the private realm. It’s not enough to say “I like that” or “It wasn’t really my cup of tea.” We insist on stronger assertions, on objective statements. “That was great! That was terrible!”

Or maybe that’s just me. This newspaper, after all, pays me to turn my personal impressions of movies into persuasive arguments — not only to share my feelings about movies but also to assess them and provide some useful counsel to readers. So it might seem as if I’m setting out here to make a self-serving point. Don’t trust the Hollywood insiders who control the Oscars! Ignore the quantified peer pressure of Rotten Tomatoes or Box Office Mojo! Listen to me!

And sure: I do have a stake in defending the relevance of my own job, even as I grant that it’s kind of a ridiculous way to pay the rent. Critics are sometimes appreciated — or even, in rare cases, admired, like Roger Ebert — but we are more often feared, resented or ignored altogether. In the popular mind, critics are haters and killjoys. Maybe we’re sadists, like the viperous, martini-swilling New York Times theater reviewer in “Birdman.” Or maybe we’re masochists: In spite of that cruel caricature, “Birdman,” an Oscar best picture, is “Certified Fresh” by Rotten Tomatoes (I think it’s vastly overrated, by the way, but that’s just my opinion).

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The ability of critics to make a living may be precarious, but criticism remains an indispensable activity. The making of art — popular or fine, abstruse or accessible, sacred or profane — is one of the glories of our species. We are uniquely endowed with the capacity to fashion representations of the world and our experience in it, to tell stories and draw pictures, to organize sound into music and movement into dance. Just as miraculously, we have the ability, even the obligation, to judge what we have made, to argue about why we are moved, mystified, delighted or bored by any of it. At least potentially, we are all artists. And because we have the ability to recognize and respond to the creativity of others, we are all, at least potentially, critics, too.

This means, above all, that our job is to think. As consumers of culture, we are lulled into passivity or, at best, prodded toward a state of pseudo-semi-self-awareness, encouraged toward either the defensive group identity of fandom or a shallow, half-ironic eclecticism. We graze, we binge, we pick up and discard aesthetic experiences as if they were cheap toys. Which they frequently are — mass-produced widgets from the corporate assembly line.