disliking something now requires little justification or explanation — it is taken as a sign of more acute sensibilities, or even moral seriousness — whereas positively liking, even loving, a film, a book, an album, a work of art, a speech, a public figure, a shared moment in our common life, is ab initio suspicious, taken as a sign of credulity, inattentiveness, unseriousness, unawakened conformity. In this respect, criticism in our time invariably has a certain (and somewhat debased) moral inflection to it.
there is no doubt that there are forms of praise that should be deemed unworthy insofar as they are directed at an unworthy object or action — we would call these “false praise”, flattery, pandering, or even idolatry.
there are also forms of criticism that should rightly be characterised as “vain”, in that they seem to have more to do with the standing or self-promotion of the critic — the analogy here would be something closer to blasphemy, or the hardness of heart that cannot, or will not, recognise any deeper meaning worth contemplating