On its own, criticism is itself a negative term, to find all the failures within the given text. But it usually depends on how you use the term. Constructive criticism is a good kind of criticism, generally pointing out the good things.
The word criticism sort of works like consequence. The word can be both negative, and positive, depending how it is used. But your question asks about the word criticism by itself, in this case, the answer is True.
Hopefully this helps, even though my answer is a little late.