Contemporary society is offered new pieces of art every day, and that can be interpreted as indirect communication. The audience has to make its choice, and art reviews are a good means to help people orient themselves in this variety. This article is relevant in that it provides an insight into how reviewers understand certain works of art, how they express their opinion or attitude towards them, and what evaluation they give, which in turn helps the audience to form its own opinion about the reviewed works. The object of the research is the evaluation of different pieces of art expressed through modality in present-day Lithuanian and English reviews found in the media. The article aims to find out how different means of realizing modality are employed to express the speaker’s/writer’s positive and/or negative attitude or evaluation of a piece of art in Lithuanian and English reviews. This is done by setting such objectives as identifying the means by which different shades of evaluation are revealed in Lithuanian and English art reviews and later comparing and analysing the results. There seems to be a tendency to employ modality as a means of mitigating negative evaluations in Lithuanian art reviews, whereas English reviewers tend to apply other means. The material for the research was compiled from the Lithuanian periodical Literatūra ir menas and the Review section of the British periodical The Observer from the years 2009–2010. Descriptive, contrastive and analytical methods were applied. The theoretical part of the article surveys the review as a discourse type and enumerates its aims and functions. It also considers evaluation as one of the basic functions of the review. Modality is treated here as a means of expressing the reviewer’s attitude towards the work analysed. The article briefly reviews different approaches to modality and its definitions and then defines text modality as it is used here, i.e. as a universal linguistic, communicative-pragmatic category focusing mainly on the author’s opinion about and attitude towards the analysed work. The results of the research show that modal adverbs are used similarly to express greater or lesser certainty in art reviews, whereas other means of expressing modality appear more frequently in Lithuanian art reviews than in their English counterparts.