What is the point of literary criticism?

(obviously many of the goals can serve each other. But which seems most promising to you as a direction for the field/best characterizes your vision of your work?)

My own journey, by the way, was to start out thinking that I was going to do 2, realize that the nature of the literary work meant I could only accomplish that by doing 1, only to realize that I was doing both 2 and 1 ultimately as a way to do a version of 4.

I suppose a followup to 4 would be: why think that artistic experience is worth grasping?