One of the problems in the use of evolutionary computer systems in artistic tasks is the lack of artificial models of human critics. In this paper, based on the state of the art and on our previous related work, we propose a general architecture for an artificial art critic, and a strategy for the validation of this type of system. The architecture includes two modules: the analyser, which does a pre-processing of the artwork, extracting several measurements and characteristics; and the evaluator, which, based on the output of the analyser, classifies the artwork according to a certain criteria. The validation procedure consists of several stages, ranging from author and style discrimination to the integration of critic in a dynamic environment together with humans.