Words from Michael Fried

"There is nothing binding in the value judgments of formal criticism. All judgments of value begin and end in experience, or ought to, and if someone does not feel that Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, Matisse's Piano Lesson, or Pollock's Autumn Rhythm are superb paintings, no critical arguments can take the place of feeling it. On the other hand, one's experiences of works of art are always informed by what one has come to understand about them, and it is the job of the formal critic both to objectify his intuitions with all the intellectual rigor at his command and to be on his guard against enlisting a formalist rhetoric in defense of merely private enthusiasms."

As someone who tends toward formalism, I dig it!
From Art and Objecthood.