A record can be praised by critics and ignored by listeners, passed over by an award jury and rediscovered years later. Each verdict arrives with an authority of its own and is easily taken for the truth about the work: a prize for proof of quality, a widely repeated review for a consensus, one remark in a headline for the artist's mind. This study reads a set of public records that give no verdicts. They ask how verdicts are made, and what has to be held apart before any verdict can be read.
The records come from Dionyas, the music studio of the RISCON family. Dionyas does not publish judgments. Its list of 1,539 inquiries describes itself as editorial question design and gives its count of generated judgments as 0. Part of the list consists of general review designs: questions written for no particular artist or work. This study reads the sixteen that belong to the studio's domain of criticism and recognition. Dionyas does not say who drafted them. What they offer is not a finding about critics, juries or newspapers but a design for asking about them, written down and left open.
The research question and the contribution
The research question is this: how do questions about the evaluation of music design their asking before any judgment, that is, what do they ask a verdict of critics, awards, fans or the media to rest on, what do they ask to be kept apart, and what do they leave unasked?
The study reads sixteen general designs chosen by one rule, set out in the method section, and makes two contributions. The first concerns the debate on critics, publics and the media, which asks whether and how critics stand between works and their audiences, and what the coverage of culture does besides judging it. The sixteen questions take a definite position in the design of their asking: each sets two grounds of evaluation side by side, and the questions on criticism ask about the grounds of a verdict rather than for a verdict. This study calls that design an evaluation of evaluation and describes it record by record. The second contribution concerns the debate on consecration, reputation and classification, which describes how some works come to be set apart as art. The questions take up moments that literature studies after the fact, the re-evaluation of a neglected album, the album that fits no category, the institution's verdict, and turn each into a question put before any verdict. The study also names what the questions leave out: peers, playlists and the person who evaluates.
Critics, publics and the media
The first debate asks what critics actually do. Wesley Shrum, in Critics and Publics: Cultural Mediation in Highbrow and Popular Performing Arts (1991), notes that the claim that critics mediate between artworks and publics had often been made but never adequately tested, and that arguments from cultural capital expect the mediation to work differently in highbrow and popular genres. Using shows and reviews from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he finds that positive reviews go with larger audiences only in highbrow genres such as theatre, that critics cannot make or break a show, and that the visibility reviews provide matters more than their evaluative function.
What critics rest their verdicts on is a second question in the same debate. Alex van Venrooij and Vaughn Schmutz, in The Evaluation of Popular Music in the United States, Germany and the Netherlands (2010), note that popular music has apparently gained status and artistic legitimacy, and that some hold its criticism has borrowed the criteria of high art while others hold it favours a popular aesthetic. Comparing album reviews in elite newspapers of three countries, they find that the boundary between the two aesthetics is weakest in the United States, that German reviewers take the most high art approach, and that Dutch reviews clearly favour the popular aesthetic. Marc Verboord, in The impact of peer-produced criticism on cultural evaluation (2013), studies how the discourse used to substantiate aesthetic evaluations differs across print, webzines, blogs and amateur postings. Analysing film reviews, he finds that peer-produced criticism challenges the hierarchical model of evaluation, which remains in use, and that the differences across platforms are continuous rather than dichotomous.
Coverage is not only criticism. Susanne Janssen, Giselinde Kuipers and Marc Verboord, in Cultural Globalization and Arts Journalism (2008), chart the coverage of foreign culture in elite newspapers of four countries over five decades, and read it as a sign of how far national elites are aware of culture from elsewhere. They find that international coverage grew in Europe but not in the United States, that a country's centrality in the cultural world-system explains the differences better than its size or cultural policy, and that coverage stays concentrated on a few countries, with non-Western countries still underrepresented.
As this study puts it, the debate runs between the critic as a judge whose verdicts move audiences and the critic, or the outlet, as a source of visibility, and it asks which criteria verdicts draw on. The Dionyas questions are a chance to see how a published design separates the attention a medium gives from the judgment it passes, and which criteria it asks an evaluator to name.
Consecration, reputation and classification
The second debate concerns how works and forms come to be set apart as art. Motti Regev, in Producing Artistic Value: The Case of Rock Music (1994), holds that a cultural form gains artistic recognition when its producers of meaning show that it carries serious meaning and aesthetic genuineness, that it comes from a definable creative entity, and that this entity is autonomous and works for the work's own sake. He describes how critics claimed such recognition for rock, among other ways by consecrating a body of albums as masterpieces and defining sonic components as its genuine language; the claim is only partly realised, yet it shows that belief in artistic hierarchies structures contemporary culture. Shyon Baumann, in Intellectualization and Art World Development: Film in the United States (2001), traces how film came to be seen as art rather than entertainment, through an artistic niche opened from outside, the institutionalisation of resources and practices within the film world, and an intellectualising discourse used by critics.
Reputation also has a history after the fact. Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, in Recognition and Renown: The Survival of Artistic Reputation (1988), distinguish recognition by peers from wider renown, and find among painter-etchers whose style had gone out of fashion that where preservation was not assured, posthumous reputation depended on the artist's own efforts, on survivors with a stake in it, on links to the cultural archives, and on retrospective interest that rediscovers an artist as the representative of newly emerging identities. Michael Patrick Allen and Anne E. Lincoln, in Critical Discourse and the Cultural Consecration of American Films (2004), ask which films were later consecrated by lists of the greatest films and by a national film registry, and find that contemporaneous professional and critical recognition of the director, and the extent of critical discourse about the film and its director, matter most; critics and scholars act in effect as reputational entrepreneurs, but within the cultural schemas available to them. Vaughn Schmutz, in Retrospective Cultural Consecration in Popular Music (2005), describes consecration as setting sacred producers and products apart from profane ones and extends that analysis to popular music, asking how popular, professional and critical reception bear on whether an album was later consecrated by a magazine.
Institutions and categories do part of this work. Michael Patrick Allen and Nicholas L. Parsons, in The Institutionalization of Fame (2006), argue that the legitimacy of a consecration project rests on the authority of the organisation, the rigour of its selection, the selectivity of its outcomes and real differences of merit, and propose a theory of cumulative recognition in which social circumstances, prior recognition and media discourse affect consecration alongside achievement. Jennifer C. Lena and Richard A. Peterson, in Classification as Culture: Types and Trajectories of Music Genres (2008), note that classification bears on both affiliation and conflict, and that genres organise people and songs in a system of symbolic classification; they find four genre types and three trajectories among sixty musics in the United States.
This study reads these works as describing evaluation from outside and after the fact. The Dionyas questions on criticism are written for someone about to evaluate, and ask that person to separate grounds the literature shows to be tangled: recognition from achievement, category from accomplishment, the institution's verdict from one's own.
The chapter that follows sets out the data and method, then reads the questions on criticism and the questions on the media. An appendix gives every record read, word for word. The conclusion returns to the two debates.