Rightly so, the quality of an artist is measured by his ability to loyally represent his unique language to us. Every artist has a reference group, his audience. They could be few or many, but they must exist for art, in its fullest sense, to exist. Modern theories of art speak about the audience as an integral and defining part of the artistic creation and even of the artefact itself. Only the artist has access to it and only he can decide how far is his representation from his original experience.
Art criticism is impossible.
No one in the audience has access to the original experience and their capacity to pass judgement is, therefore, in great doubt. On the other hand, only the reference group, only the audience can aptly judge the representation for what it is. The artist is too emotionally involved. True, the cold, objective facts concerning the work of art are available to both artist and reference group - but the audience is in a privileged status, its bias is less pronounced. Normally, the reference group will use the meta language embedded in us as humans, some empathy, some vague comparisons of emotions to try and grasp the emotional foundation laid by the artist.