Critics, award juries, fans and the press all pass verdicts on music, and each can be taken for the last word. This short study asks how a public record designs questions about those verdicts before anyone answers them. It reads sixteen inquiries from Dionyas, the music studio of the RISCON family: every general review design in its list that names the domain of criticism and recognition among its domains, eight led by that domain and eight led by media and programming. Dionyas publishes its 1,539 inquiries as editorial question designs and states that it has generated no judgment on them; it does not say who drafted these sixteen, and none names an artist, a work, an awarding body or an outlet. The records are in Korean and are read in a translation made for this study.
The study finds that every one of the sixteen sets two grounds of evaluation side by side and asks how they differ. The questions on criticism ask about the grounds of a verdict rather than for one: knowing a work's sales or not, finish or novelty, a category or an achievement. The questions on the media treat each medium as an editor whose choice can be mistaken for the artist's own. None asks which work is better, and none names a peer, a playlist or a cost. Read beside work on critics and publics and on cultural consecration, the design is an evaluation of evaluation, set down before any verdict.