This study asked how questions about the evaluation of music design their asking before any judgment. Its answer, from sixteen Dionyas general designs on criticism and the media, is that the questions ask about the grounds of verdicts rather than for verdicts. Every one sets two or more things side by side, and the questions on criticism name grounds an evaluation could rest on. The questions on criticism ask, among other things, where knowledge of sales changes a reading, how a category is kept from counting against an achievement, and how an institution's criteria are recorded apart from one's own reading. The questions on the media treat every medium as an editor and ask what its selection adds or leaves out. None of the sixteen asks which work is better.
Discussion
The debate on critics, publics and the media asks what critics and outlets do besides judge. Shrum, Critics and Publics (1991), finds that the visibility reviews give matters more than their evaluative function. On this study's reading, the Dionyas questions on the media can be set beside that distinction, and they carry it to kinds of coverage Shrum did not study. The question on repeated news asks that coverage which rewrites a single release be told apart from independent criticism and interest; the question on exposure and listening asks which scene of a programme leads to listening and on what day; the question on the representative abroad asks what a story about one artist leaves out of a country's or a genre's music. Janssen, Kuipers and Verboord, Cultural Globalization and Arts Journalism (2008), describe the concentration of coverage from the outside, by counting reports. This study reads the question on the representative abroad as describing the same concentration from inside a single story, as an omission to be looked for.
The debate on consecration, reputation and classification describes, after the fact, how some works were set apart as art and others forgotten. Lang and Lang, Recognition and Renown (1988), and Allen and Lincoln, Critical Discourse and the Cultural Consecration of American Films (2004), find, respectively, that survivors and links to the archives bear on posthumous reputation, and that critics and scholars act in effect as reputational entrepreneurs within the schemas available to them. The Dionyas question on re-evaluation asks for the change in context that such works describe, and excludes in advance the answer that the work itself changed. The question on the work outside the categories takes up what Lena and Peterson, Classification as Culture (2008), describe as a system of symbolic classification, and asks that a misfit with an award's categories not be read as a failing of the work. The question on judging without an institution's name reads, on this study's interpretation, as a refusal by the reviewer to borrow the cultural authority that Allen and Parsons, The Institutionalization of Fame (2006), find at the root of a consecration project's legitimacy.
What separates the questions from the literature is their place in time and the person they address. The literature describes evaluation by others, after it is done; the questions address someone about to evaluate, and ask that person to name what a verdict would rest on before giving it.
The design also leaves things unasked. The studio's own description of the domain speaks of the distance between the recognition of critics, awards and peers and the response of the public. None of the sixteen questions names a peer: the recognition by peers that Lang and Lang distinguish from wider renown does not appear. The studio's description of the media domain speaks of the representative image that broadcasting, news and playlists make. None of the questions names a playlist, so a medium that the studio's own description names is one the questions leave out. No question asks who the evaluator is, what training or position a critic or a juror holds, or how an outlet comes to write about one artist and not another; evaluators appear only as roles, the critics whose opposed verdicts are to be read together and the reviewers of the question on judging without an institution's name, who are asked to keep their own reading apart. No question names a cost, a fee or revenue. They are the edges of the design, and the works read above, which give recognition by peers (Lang and Lang) and the authority of the organisation (Allen and Parsons) a place in reputation, give them one that the questions do not.
Contributions
This study makes two contributions. To the debate on critics, publics and the media, it adds a measured description of a published design that separates the attention a medium gives from the judgment it passes and asks for the grounds of a critic's verdict rather than the verdict, and it reads the separation Shrum draws between visibility and evaluation as one that can be written into questions for a reader of the press. To the debate on consecration, reputation and classification, it reads the moments that literature studies after the fact, re-evaluation, a misfit with categories and an institution's verdict, turned into questions put before any verdict, with the institution kept at a distance. It also names what the design leaves out: the peers and playlists named in the studio's own description of its domains, the evaluator's position, and the economics of coverage.
Limits
The study has clear limits. It reads sixteen records chosen by one rule, all general designs written for no particular case, and its counts describe those records and nothing else. The records copy their scopes, needs, boundaries and states from the studio's domain table, so only their titles and questions can serve as evidence, and the two boundary sentences that carry the studio's caution on evaluation are treated by this study as frame. Dionyas does not say who drafted the records. The records are in Korean and are read in a single translation made for this study; a different translation could shift a nuance, though the quoted sentences are the evidence and are given in full in the appendix. The readings through the literature are this study's interpretation. Nothing here describes how critics, juries or media behave; the records frame these matters and this study has not checked them. The study gives no advice about careers, publicity or coverage, and does not rank any work, critic or outlet.
Further research
Further research could take several lines. The first is to read the same domain in its other kinds: the 115 historical questions and the 12 cases led by criticism, of which a study could ask whether they keep the grounds of evaluation apart as the general designs do, or give up the separation once a particular prize or review is in view. The second is to set the questions against practice: to put one of them, say the one on repeated news, to an actual body of coverage and see what material it calls for, what it finds and what it cannot settle. The third is to ask about the edges this study names: whether questions about peers, playlists and the evaluator's position would keep the same design, setting two grounds side by side, or would need another.
This study's contribution, stated again at its end, is a measured description of how a published set of questions designs the asking about musical evaluation: as a request to name and separate the grounds of a verdict before any verdict is given, beside literatures that describe how verdicts were reached after the fact.