Recording Academy (Grammy): Structural Analysis of a Corporate Institution in Reform

Problem statement

This section fixes the object of analysis, the angle of view, and the key distinctions the report relies on throughout. It does not state conclusions up front. Conclusions are developed sequentially across sections I–XI, from primary material to interpretation. A reader looking for a condensed summary may turn to the comparative framework in section IX and the open questions in section XI. This section instead outlines what exactly the report examines and what questions it poses.

Object of analysis. The Recording Academy, an American corporation founded in 1957 by the five largest record labels (Columbia, RCA, Decca, Capitol, MGM) and responsible for the annual Grammy Awards ceremony. The report examines its institutional work from its founding through early 2026, with particular attention to the 2018–2026 period.

Initial characterization of the institution. The Academy is an institution founded by commercial enterprises. A record label, as a corporation, has a primary obligation to its shareholders to generate profit. Any institution founded by a group of commercial corporations serves first and foremost their commercial interests. The contrary claim would require demonstrating that the founders acted against their primary institutional obligations. Hence the report's first working hypothesis: the Academy's primary function is commercial; its other functions (cultural, educational, reputational) are derivative and operate on condition that the commercial function keeps working.

Key distinction: function versus self-presentation. The report holds apart what the institution does and how the institution describes itself. This distinction serves as an analytic instrument across every section. For seventy years the Academy has publicly presented itself as a peer community that recognizes professional achievement. At the same time, for seventy years it has performed work that requires a different vocabulary to describe (developed in section I). The gap between self-presentation and function is neither an accusation nor an exposé. It is a structural feature of institutions founded by commercial actors in cultural fields: the public language operates on one functional plane, the actual institutional work on another. The report examines both levels without conflating them.

Three analytic frames. The report uses three complementary frames, each yielding different information about the same object.

The commercial frame describes the Academy as a mechanism through which its commercial founders distribute attention to their own products and raise their market value. This frame works with the concepts of the corporate cycle of symbolic certification, the advertising function of the prestige catalog, and the Grammy effect as a market mechanism. The commercial frame is primary in this report because it follows directly from the institutional nature of the founders.

The cultural frame (the Alexandrian tradition in cultural sociology) describes the Academy as an institution that performs ritual and produces symbolic consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu). This frame works with the concepts of binary codes, performance, ceremonial ritual, the empty sacred signifier, settled/unsettledHabitus broken or threatened; manifestos and declarations signal instability (Swidler) culture, re-fusion/de-fusion. The cultural frame applies to how the Academy looks in public and how the audience perceives it.

The political frame describes the Academy as an institution in the field of cultural recognition, where three regimes compete: direct market democracy, representative peer democracy, direct algorithmic democracy. This frame works with the concepts of mandate declarability, the representational regime, and fictitious representation. The political frame applies to the Academy's relations with its audience and with the surrounding institutional environment.

The three frames do not contradict one another. They describe a single institutional reality in different registers. The report's task is to show that they yield consistent, mutually reinforcing interpretations, and that a complete understanding of the Academy requires all three at once.

Periodization. The report considers the Academy's history in four phases.

First, 1957–2000. Founding and stable operation of the corporate mechanism while the industry held a monopoly over music distribution channels.

Second, 2000–2015. Fragmentation of distribution channels through digital platforms. The mechanism operates by inertia, but institutional reform is not initiated.

Third, 2018–2022. External crisis (the Portnow press conference of 2018, the Dugan episode of 2019–2020, post-Floyd DEI pressure in 2020) activates institutional reform. The Academy reforms itself through the elimination of the Nominations Review Committees, the creation of a Chief DEI Officer, and targeted recruitment of a new membership.

Fourth, 2022–2026. The reform is operationally complete. The Academy operates in a new configuration. The report fixes the structural state of this configuration and raises questions about its stability.

Key questions the report answers. In what form did the Academy work as an institution before the reform. What happened in 2000–2015. What is the substantive nature of the 2018–2022 reform. How does it differ structurally from the reforms of other cultural institutions in the same period. What is the stable state of the Academy after 2022. Is substantive restoration of its former functions possible, and under what conditions. How far does the Grammy analysis extend to other representative institutions of Western culture in the 2010s–2020s.

Limitations. The report analyzes the structural parameters of the institution, not its individual leaders and not specific decisions at the level of particular Grammy categories. Named individuals (Portnow, Dugan, Mason) are considered only to the extent needed to describe the structural shift. The analysis does not aim at evaluative criticism of any participant in the process. The register is academically neutral: the report describes processes, it does not judge people.

Map of sections. The sections unfold sequentially, from description to diagnosis. Section I examines the 1957 founding and the institution's work in the first stable phase, 1957–2000. Section II analyzes the Portnow press conference of 2018 as the first visible fracture. Section III treats the Deborah Dugan episode of 2019–2020 as a ritual of expulsion of an external reformer. Section IV addresses the language of the 2020–2022 reform. Section V covers the Academy's dual ritual and its operation in the new configuration. Section VI conducts an empirical test of the report's central hypothesis across three independent source types. Section VII describes the state of the empty house after the public abdication. Section VIII lays out three scenarios for development over a 5–10 year horizon. Section IX provides the comparative framework that places Grammy within the series of other cultural institutions. Section X situates it in the broader crisis of representative institutions in Western culture. Section XI gathers the open questions left for further research.

Methodological framework

Aim of the study. To describe what happened to the Recording Academy during 2000–2022 and to fix the structural state of the institution after the 2018–2022 reform. To examine the Academy's institutional work on two levels: what the institution did within the corporate infrastructure of the recording industry and how it publicly represented that work. To compare Grammy with the other cultural institutions in the series (Iowa MFA, NEA, AMPAS, Ford Foundation, Disney, Netflix) in order to see which structural parameters explain the differing trajectories. To formulate the conditions under which the Academy's institutional work in its former form could be restored, and to assess the likelihood of those conditions. To situate the Grammy case in the broader crisis of representative institutions in Western culture in the 2010s–2020s.

Unit of analysis. The Academy is treated not as an award, not as an organization, and not as a media event, but as a corporate institution founded by commercial enterprises. The unit of analysis is the Academy's institutional work: what the institution produces, for whom, and under what conditions that work is stable. The report examines this work on two levels. First, the functional level. For seventy years the Academy performed a specific kind of work within the music industry, described through the concepts of symbolic certification and the corporate cycle (section I). Second, the level of self-presentation. The Academy publicly represented its work in a different register, through peer recognition and the pedagogical category. The gap between these two levels is a structural feature the report keeps working with throughout.

Two registers. The report operates within the Alexandrian frame of cultural sociology: binary codes, performance, ritual, settled/unsettledHabitus broken or threatened; manifestos and declarations signal instability (Swidler) culture, cultural trauma claimAppropriation of someone else's real pain as a source of one's own moral authority (Alexander & Eyerman). The Gramscian analysis of capture mechanisms is carried in a companion report [Recording Academy (Grammy): DEI — Capturing the Institutional Megaphone in 16 Months]. Shared empirics (the 2018–2026 chronology, Form 990, Nielsen, the mechanics of dissolving the Nominations Review Committees, statistics on the new membership) are cited via the tag [a]; full figures reside in the Gramscian report.

The conceptual distinction between the two registers runs deeper than a simple division of labor. The Gramscian optic works with the mechanisms by which a new cultural order is established: through which concrete institutional decisions hegemony shifts, who takes them, which procedures change, what financial and personnel shifts secure the change. It is an optic of the political economy of cultural institutions that sees the process through the action of concrete actors with concrete resources. The Alexandrian optic works with the narrative framingA ready-made interpretation: who is to blame, what to do, why act now (Snow & Benford) of the same process: how the institution publicly tells the story of its own changes, which sacred codes it declares, how those codes relate to ritual practice, how the two levels (sacred code and ritual) diverge or converge. It is an optic of cultural semantics that sees the process through how the institution describes itself and what that description does to its legitimacy. The two registers are not reducible to one another. The Gramscian does not explain why the Academy chose the DEI frame specifically as the language of its abdication rather than some other public formulation. The Alexandrian does not explain how precisely the Tina Tchen Task Force was structurally organized, how the vote on dissolving the Nominations Review Committees was conducted, which financial flows secured the reform. Two questions about different objects; two registers for two objects.

The Alexandrian report answers the question "why did the Academy abdicate responsibility for the pedagogical function it had carried for seventy years, and why did it choose the DEI frame as the language of that abdication." The Gramscian report answers the question "how did the capture occur": who, when, through which decisions turned peer review into crowd review.

Conceptual apparatus.

Binary codes (Alexander). Culture divides the world into sacred and profane poles. The pair is emotionally and morally charged, and through it participants interpret everything that happens within the institution's boundaries.

Performance (Alexander). A social action that works when the audience believes the performer is sincere. Re-fusion: the performance persuaded. De-fusion: the performance has ceased to persuade.

Ritual (Alexander). A recurring, institutionalized performance. The audience knows the script, its own role, and how to react. A ritual works only under coordination between performer and audience.

Ceremonial ritual (Alexander, Durkheim). A subtype of ritual in which participants publicly reaffirm collective values by being present at an action with a clearly marked sacred center: a laureate, a winner, a consecrated object. The televised Grammy ceremony belongs to this type.

Peer consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) (Bourdieu, extended). A subtype of consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) in which a peer consecrates a peer: symbolic capital endows an agent of the same capital type. The vote of Recording Academy members on work by members is peer consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu). It works as long as the external audience believes that the voters are in fact competent peers.

Three regimes of cultural recognition (the report's working typology). The institutional mechanisms through which a cultural field decides what deserves public attention. There are three regimes.

Direct market democracy. The criterion of recognition is the number of copies, tickets, or subscriptions sold. The mass audience votes with its wallet; the institution records the result. The mediator is absent or minimal (a sales counter). In American music culture this regime was dominant until 1957: the Hollywood Walk of Fame of 1956–1957 required a musician candidate to have sold at least one million records or 250,000 albums.

Representative peer democracy. The criterion of recognition is the judgment of competent professional representatives, co-opted into the institution. The mass audience receives the result through representatives whose work consists in the shaping of taste. The mediator here is the peer elite, supported by a taste-shaping infrastructure. In American music culture this regime is introduced in 1957 with the founding of the Recording Academy and dominates until the early 2000s.

Direct algorithmic democracy. The criterion of recognition is the number of streams, views, shares, and reactions, aggregated by platform algorithms. The mass audience again votes directly, as in the first regime, but through a digital infrastructure. There is a mediator, but it is not an expert one. It is an algorithm for aggregating engagement. In American music culture this regime becomes dominant in 2000–2015 (Napster, iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, TikTok).

The sequence of the three regimes is cyclical: direct democracy → representative → direct again, but in a new infrastructural form. The return to direct democracy in 2000–2015 structurally places representative institutions in a position where their function is already being performed without them. Grammy in 2018–2022 is one concrete case of the general crisis of representative institutions in Western culture during this period (developed further in section X).

Symbolic certification of the corporate cycle (the report's working term, primary). The function the Academy produces at the institutional level within the commercial infrastructure of the recording industry. The Academy issues symbolic marks (the Grammy stamp, laureate statuses, categorical recognitions) that attach to the movement of musical products from label through distribution to consumer. The term has three components, each working on its own. Symbolic signals that the Academy does not produce a physical product; it produces a mark that attaches to an already-existing product (the recording). Certification signals that the mark functions as a trust signal for the market: it attests that the product possesses a certain quality recognized by an institution of appropriate authority. Of the corporate cycle signals the environment in which certification has functional meaning: a closed commercial infrastructure in which corporate actors (the labels) control the certifying institution so as to recover, downstream, the increased value of certified products. The term is called primary because it follows directly from the institutional nature of the Academy's founders: the five-label group is a set of commercial corporations; any institution founded by them serves first and foremost their commercial interests; therefore the primary function of the founded institution is commercial.

What certification produces: three classes of output. First class: certification of the labels' specific products. A Grammy stamp on an album raises its sales (the effect documented as the Grammy bounce) and keeps the product in the catalog longer than it would otherwise remain. Second class: the reputation of the label's brand. Columbia, with laureates in prestige categories, acquires the status of a serious label, which in turn raises the value of all its other releases, including mass hits. The prestige catalog is an advertising asset for the whole label, not only for its own artists. Third class: industry coordination. The Grammy ceremony is an annual venue at which label heads, producers, managers, and media partners meet and coordinate marketing decisions, industry alliances, and personnel moves. An institutional infrastructure for coordinating the market operates under the cover of peer recognition.

Pedagogical mandate (the report's working term, subordinate). The pedagogical effect the Academy produces as the operating condition of the certification cycle. The mandate is not an independent goal of the institution; it is a subordinate function: as long as the mass audience has been trained to regard Grammy choices as correct, the certification mark functions as a trust signal and raises the value of the product. If the audience ceases to be trained, certification stops working. Substantively, the mandate can be described as the position from which the institution derives the right to shape mass taste rather than merely reflect it. That position requires two supports: internal conviction of the holders in the legitimacy of their own judgment, plus external legitimacy granted by the audience and adjacent institutions to occupy that position. The pedagogical mandate does not require public articulation of criteria, because the mandate itself stands in for the criterion: so long as the institution holds the teacher's position and the audience accepts that position, it is not necessary to formulate in substance what it is transmitting. A key characteristic of the Academy's pedagogical mandate: it describes how the Academy publicly represented its own work and how the audience perceived that work, not the primary work itself. The term is used in this report to speak about the cultural side of the institutional work and to permit comparison with institutions in which the pedagogical function is in fact primary (Iowa MFA, NEA), where it is declared openly and stands autonomous from commercial work.

Pedagogical function (the report's working term, subordinate). The practice the institution produces in performing the pedagogical mandate. What the Academy in fact did in the world from 1957 to 2000: shaping mass taste through a working infrastructure for disseminating peer decisions, turning peer judgment into the habit of distinguishing in music, sustaining a hierarchy between "important" and "unimportant" for the mass audience. The function required two conditions: a working mandate and a working taste-shaping infrastructure. Without infrastructure the mandate remained a position without a practice. Without the mandate the infrastructure transmitted whatever, but not pedagogical judgment. The pedagogical function, like the pedagogical mandate, was subordinate to the certification cycle: it ensured that the mass audience perceived the Grammy choice as meaningful, which was the necessary condition for certification to work.

Taste-shaping instruments (the report's working term). The infrastructure through which the pedagogical function operated. For the music industry of 1957–2000 it included radio, television (MTV from 1981), print publications (Rolling Stone, Billboard, Down Beat), the catalogs of major labels, the system of awards and critical rankings, the live-tour infrastructure. These instruments were not neutral channels of transmission but forming filters: through them peer choice acquired public visibility, while content unapproved by the peer community did not reach the mass audience in comparable volume. A crucial point: the taste-shaping instruments were not an autonomous pedagogical system; they were part of the corporate cycle of certification. Radio rotation depended commercially on labels (pluggers, promo budgets). MTV received video clips from labels. Criticism was formed in social circles that overlapped with the industry. The CBS broadcast was an advertising contract. Major-label catalogs were commercial reissues. The instruments transmitted peer choice and at the same time sold label products; the two processes were inseparable. The fragmentation of taste-shaping instruments in 2000–2015 (Napster, iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok) deprived the peer elite of the infrastructure through which its mandate had previously operated as a function; simultaneously it dismantled the working corporate cycle of certification.

The relation of pedagogical mandate to symbolic certification. The pedagogical mandate and symbolic certification of the corporate cycle are not two different phenomena but two descriptions of the same institutional work of the Academy in different registers. The pedagogical mandate describes this work through its cultural side (shaping mass taste). Symbolic certification describes it through its commercial side (raising the value of the labels' products). Both sides have been present in the Academy simultaneously since 1957. The hierarchy between them is determined by the institutional nature of the founders: the Academy was founded by commercial enterprises, for which any institution they create primarily serves their commercial interests. Hence the pedagogical mandate is a subordinate category, subordinated to the certification function. This is the inverse hierarchy of the one in which the Academy publicly represented its work, where pedagogy appeared primary and the commercial function appeared secondary or absent. The report holds to the actual hierarchy (certification primary, pedagogy subordinate) as a central analytic proposition. It is justified in section I through an analysis of the 1957 genealogy.

Declarability of the pedagogical mandate (the report's working term). A property of an institution: whether it publicly claims to be a pedagogical institution that shapes taste, or publicly represents itself otherwise while in fact carrying out pedagogical work as a subordinate function.

Declared mandate. The institution publicly claims to be pedagogical. Its statutes, mission, and public rhetoric explicitly speak of formation, instruction, transmission of knowledge. The Iowa Writers' Workshop has a declared mandate: it is an educational program explicitly stated as pedagogical, and pedagogy there is primary, not subordinate. Universities, conservatories, and the National Endowment for the Arts have declared mandates in the same form.

Undeclared mandate. The institution publicly presents itself as an award, an arbiter, a professional community, but not as a teacher. Yet it in fact produces a pedagogical effect through external infrastructure. Grammy belongs to this type: the institution's public self-presentation focuses on peer recognition within the profession; the pedagogical effect operates without public articulation. The key distinction from the declared case: in an undeclared mandate the pedagogical function is subordinate to the certification cycle, whereas in a declared mandate it can be primary.

Constitutive undeclarability. A special form of undeclarability in which the institution is founded in such a way that openly acknowledging the pedagogical function would destroy its legitimating structure. Such undeclarability is neither accidental nor correctable by simple communications-office revisions: it is an architectural element of the institution's constitution. Grammy belongs to this subtype. The institution's genealogy makes public articulation of any cultural mandate problematic. In 1957 the five labels, as commercial actors, took the public-recognition function away from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. The aim was to restore the advertising work of their prestige catalogs. Open acknowledgment of the pedagogical function would expose the commercial character of the founding act and would translate the institution's legitimacy from the pre-reflective into the disputable. Detailed treatment in section I.

Two-phase process (the report's descriptive construction, canonical label). An institutional transition in two structurally different phases. First phase, 2000–2015: loss of the function. The taste-shaping infrastructure fragments through digital platforms. The peer elite retains the mandate (internal conviction and external legitimacy of its position) but loses the function: its judgments no longer turn into mass habit, because the instruments of dissemination have passed into other hands. The reform that might have restored the function through new infrastructure is not initiated, because seventy years of dominance have bred an inertia in which reform "while things are still fine" is institutionally impossible. Second phase, 2018–2022: public abdication of responsibility for the pedagogical function, framed through the construction of a false history of its own bias. When the loss of function becomes visible through concrete events, the institution chooses between two paths. Acknowledge the missed modernization as its own failure and defend the mandate at the cost of a smaller audience. Or publicly redefine the former function as untenable, justifying this through a narrative of historical bias. The second path was chosen. The Academy constructed a narrative of "historic underrepresentation" of women and Black artists on the roll of laureates as the foundation for the DEI reform. The empirical evidence does not support this narrative (see section VI, the block "Conditions of falsification" and the fact-check on institutional bias). Black artists and women have been amply and continuously represented among Big Four laureates and in genre categories since 1959. The DEI reform operates as the language of public abdication of responsibility for the pedagogical function: the institution abandons the teacher's position by reformulating its past work as historically biased, when institutional bias in the alleged scale did not in fact exist. The report's hypothesis: after both phases have been passed through, return to the pedagogical position over a five- to ten-year horizon is unlikely. The conditions for return (new leadership willing to occupy the teacher's position without simultaneously disavowing it and without relying on a constructed narrative of bias; a new taste-shaping infrastructure working through the institution; external recognition of the legitimacy of the position) are not observed within the current horizon.

In the rest of the report the process is referred to by three interchangeable labels: "two-phase process" (full label), "the process across two phases" (in prose, when the whole process is meant), "public abdication of responsibility" (in prose, when only the second phase is meant).

Fictitious representation (the report's working term, diagnostic). A regime in which a representative institution retains the form of representation but its content is substituted or lost. The term is descriptive and each time requires a concrete indication of in what the fictitiousness consists. An abstract assertion that "the institution has become fictitious," without specifying dimensions of fictitiousness, is rhetorical rather than analytic. The report identifies three dimensions of fictitiousness applicable to the Recording Academy after the 2018–2022 reform. Each dimension is formulated as a checkable proposition.

First dimension: fictitiousness by criterion of selecting representatives. Genuine peer representation selects its representatives for their expert competence in the domain they represent (producers judge producing, engineers judge engineering, composers judge composition). Competence does not require elected status (representatives may be co-opted), but it must be verifiable. After 2018–2022 the Academy shifted to selecting new members by demographic categories (POC, gender, age <40), while parallel verification of professional competence weakened. The Member Review Committees that had verified the professional status of new members were dissolved on April 30, 2021 [a]. In the 2024 intake of 3,900 new members, demographics was a constitutive criterion, not one criterion alongside competence. This is fictitiousness in the precise sense: the procedure retains the label "peer" but ceases to verify that the new member is in fact a peer in the professional sense.

Second dimension: fictitiousness by content of judgment. Genuine peer representation produces a substantive judgment about the work (this album has the best production because it deploys such-and-such decisions). The judgment relies on criteria that representatives share (not necessarily explicit, but in actual operation). After 2022 the Academy no longer produces substantive judgments about work in public communication. Press releases, speeches by leadership, CEO interviews, annual reports do not formulate aesthetic grounds for the choice of laureates. This is confirmed by three tests in section VI: no new aesthetic formulation in official speech, in laureate speeches, or in industry post-show analysis. Representatives vote; the institution announces the result; but the institution does not reproduce their judgment as a substantive statement. What remains is a procedural assertion without representational content. This is fictitiousness in the precise sense: the form of voting is retained, the function of judgment is not produced.

Third dimension: fictitiousness in relation to those represented. Genuine representation presumes that those represented can recognize the representatives as their own. In peer representation this feature is satisfied through professional belonging: producers recognize other producers as their own, because they work in the same field. After 2018–2022 the Academy expanded membership by demographic criteria but did not specify whose representation this is. If representatives are selected by demographic categories, then who are the represented: those same demographic categories in the world at large, the entire recording industry, the mass audience? In the Academy's public communications the representation is claimed as "representation of the music community in its diversity." This is a formulation whose referent is undefined (neither quantitatively nor qualitatively). Representation without a defined represented is not representation in the full sense. This is fictitiousness in the precise sense: the sign of representation exists (voters in somebody's name), the referent of that sign is absent.

The three dimensions of fictitiousness are empirically testable. If any one of them failed to hold, the diagnosis of fictitiousness would require revision. That could mean: the Academy's resumption of verifying professional competence alongside the demographic quota (for the first dimension), public formulation of aesthetic judgments as institutional ones (for the second), definition of the represented community with concrete boundaries (for the third).

Empty sacred signifier (empty signifier, derived from Alexander). A sacred pole defined only negatively. The formula "Artistic excellence without regard to sales" says what excellence is not. A positive definition has never been formulated by the institution. This corresponds to two interconnected circumstances. First: for an institution that operates as a corporate cycle of symbolic certification, there is no need to formulate a positive definition of excellence, since the certification mark functions without that definition so long as the audience is trained to accept the institution's choice as meaningful. Second: any positive definition of excellence stated publicly could be contested, and the certification effect would weaken. The empty signifier is a consequence of the certifying work of the institution, not its defect. At Iowa MFA an analogous empty signifier is protected by the pedagogical format (a two-year workshop reproduces the habitus independently of the student cohort). At Grammy it was sustained by the industry's monopoly over distribution (radio, TV, criticism, label catalogs). When the monopoly over distribution broke down, the empty signifier ceased to be workable, and the institution was left with the peer community's invisible habitus, which no longer circulated through the infrastructure.

Dual ritual (secondary descriptor). The Recording Academy formally performs two rituals: a closed peer consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) (the members' vote) and an open ceremonial ritual (the televised ceremony). This duality was an instrument of the pedagogical mandate: the peer decision acquired public visibility through the ceremonial performance and turned into a mass habit through the taste-shaping instruments. The two rituals were not autonomous structures but parts of a single taste-shaping mechanism. Their public divergence after 2018 is a symptom of the loss of the pedagogical mandate, not an autonomous cause of the crisis.

Settled/UnsettledHabitus broken or threatened; manifestos and declarations signal instability (Swidler) culture (Swidler). In settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) periods the institution works through an invisible habitus; nobody asks about criteria. In unsettledHabitus broken or threatened; manifestos and declarations signal instability (Swidler) periods manifestos, reforms, and public declarations of criteria appear. Explicit ideology is a signal of instability.

Cultural DiamondFour poles of a cultural object: creator, object, receiver, social world (Griswold) (Griswold). Four poles of a cultural object: creator, object, receiver, social world. De-fusion is a break along a specific axis. The report uses the scheme to locate Grammy's two consecutive de-fusions.

FramingA ready-made interpretation: who is to blame, what to do, why act now (Snow & Benford) (Snow & Benford). Diagnostic frame (who is to blame), prognostic frame (what to do), motivational frame (why act now). Applied to the 2018–2021 reform as an attempt at a new framingA ready-made interpretation: who is to blame, what to do, why act now (Snow & Benford) of the old institution.

Cultural trauma claimAppropriation of someone else's real pain as a source of one's own moral authority (Alexander & Eyerman) (Alexander & Eyerman). The institution appropriates collective pain as a source of moral legitimacy. In the report it is applied to the Academy's use of the racial-injustice narrative in 2018–2020, with an explicit caveat about extension of the concept (section IV).

Narrative. The structure through which the institution tells the story of itself to the public and to itself. It rests on binary codes and narrative genres in Alexander & Smith (1993, 2003), on the four levels of narrativity in Somers (1994), and on the collective-action frame in Polletta (1998, 2006). For this report's purposes narrative is considered in two optics simultaneously, which describe different dimensions of the same cultural object.

First optic: four axes of narrative. The axes ask the questions the narrative answers. Each axis is independent of the others, and the institution can answer different questions with different clarity.

First axis. Identity. Who we are and who they are. Where the boundary runs between those who belong and those who do not, and through which markers it is drawn.

Second axis. Time. Where history is flowing. Toward progress, toward return, toward cyclical recurrence, toward disintegration.

Third axis. Good and evil. Where the moral boundary runs, and which actions are classified as transgressions.

Fourth axis. Scale. The distribution of loudness in the narrative: which themes the institution places at the center of attention and which it leaves at the periphery or does not name at all. Not geographic distance, but the difference between subjects about which the institution speaks publicly and subjects about which it does not.

Second optic: Somers' (1994) four levels of narrativity. The levels describe not the content of the narrative but the scale of its operation. A single actor or institution operates on all four levels at once, and the question is how the levels relate to one another.

First level. Ontological narrative. The story the actor tells itself about who it is and what it does. For an institution this is the internal self-describing narrative, maintained by membership, leadership, archive, corporate memory.

Second level. Public narrative. The story that circulates in a wider community beyond a single actor. For Grammy this is the narrative of "the year's main music ceremony," living in the press, in social media, in mass consciousness, not owned by the Academy itself and only partly controlled by it.

Third level. Conceptual narrative. The story formulated by the professional community of researchers and critics. For the music field this is the narrative of the history of popular American music in academic musicology and sociology.

Fourth level. Metanarrative. The large historical-philosophical frames in which all the other levels unfold. For Grammy after 2018 two such metanarratives matter. First: history moves toward ever more groups receiving recognition that previously belonged only to white men, and the Academy's reform is the next step of this expansion. Second: professional institutions are gradually losing their own standards under pressure from demographic quotas, and Grammy is one case of that disintegration.

In settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) periods narrative works as an invisible background: none of the four questions of the first optic is asked publicly, all four levels of the second optic are mutually consistent. In unsettledHabitus broken or threatened; manifestos and declarations signal instability (Swidler) periods the questions become public, the levels diverge. Both optics are used in section IV. The first shows which axes came into motion after 2018. The second shows on which level divergence began and how it propagated to the others.

The report's standpoint. The analysis is built from an explicit frame, which it is worth stating so that the reader can see the point of view from which judgments are made. The frame consists of five propositions.

First. The mass audience in the role of pupil is not a demeaning of the audience but the normal state of affairs when a pedagogical system is working. Direct shaping of taste by the mass through engagement algorithms and platform virality produces worse results than peer-mediated shaping through teacher institutions. This is not a sentimental preference but a practical judgment: mass convergence to the lowest common denominator, and the amplification of what is already massive at the expense of what is less massive, offers no development for either the audience or the culture.

Second. The peer elite that occupies the teacher's position is legitimate functionally, not aristocratically. It is legitimate precisely to the extent that it can in practice confirm its pedagogical role: effectively shape mass taste so that the audience develops. If the peer elite loses that ability, through internal deafness, through loss of instruments, through any other cause, the question of its legitimacy is open. Not because its moral critics are right, but because the institution has stopped doing what justified its position.

Third. The report operates within a metamodern frame, not a modern and not a postmodern one. This means that an aesthetic criterion is possible and formulable as a mature substantive position; that refusal to formulate it is not wisdom but an infantile evasion of the institution's central work. The postmodern proposition that "all standards are a convention of power" is not adopted by the report as a live position, since metamodernity as a cultural moment has already worked through it.

Fourth. An institution's public acknowledgment of its own past injustice is a mature and honest move when there was injustice. A public acknowledgment of an injustice that did not exist at the alleged scale, and the construction of a false history of its own bias for the sake of a politically expedient narrative of the current moment, is straightforward intellectual dishonesty. This is a factual judgment, verifiable against data on the actual roster of laureates.

Fifth. An institution's refusal to formulate an aesthetic criterion is not wise forbearance but institutional infantilism. A mature institution that claims a pedagogical role is obliged to answer the central philosophical questions of its own activity. Grammy has not formulated a criterion for seventy years, and this has been a working configuration so long as the mandate carried the function in place of a criterion. At the moment of crisis this lack of formulation became a vulnerability, and the report describes that vulnerability as a real structural problem, not as a virtue of "openness."

These five propositions are the report's opening frame. A reader who shares them will see an analytic description. A reader who does not share them will see the position from which this description is produced.

Source types. First level: Recording Academy press releases, statements by Harvey Mason Jr., statutory formulations of the mission, Nielsen data, Form 990 (EIN 95-6052058, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer). Second level: Billboard, Variety, Rolling Stone, NPR, The Hollywood Reporter, Associated Press. Third level: the Deborah Dugan complaint filed with the EEOC (January 2020), whose authenticity has not been contested and whose content is verified by independent sources. Fourth level: archival material on the first ceremony in 1959 and on the 1990 Milli Vanilli scandal.

Limitations. Demographic data on the electorate before 2019 were not published by the Recording Academy. Nielsen counts by two methodologies (Big Data + Panel and classical panel); small discrepancies between sources are possible. The link between the composition of new membership and the composition of laureates in 2022–2026 is shown through correlation; direct causal attribution at this data size cannot be established.

I. Founding and the empty code (1957–1990)

Origins as the appropriation of a function from the Chamber of Commerce

Before 1957, public recognition of American musicians operated in a regime of direct market democracy. The arbiter was the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which in 1956–1957 was building out the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The Chamber established four selection committees across four divisions of the entertainment industry: film, television, radio, and recording. The recording committee initially set a specific, publicly articulated criterion for a musician's entry onto the Walk: at minimum one million records sold or 250,000 albums sold [1]. The criterion was quantitative, verifiable, transparent. The audience voted through sales; the Chamber recorded the result as stars on the sidewalk.

The recording committee soon discovered that this criterion excluded a substantial portion of what the industry regarded as important music. Prestige jazz artists (Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker), the classical repertoire, gospel (Mahalia Jackson), and adjacent genres sold moderately. These were the labels' advertising assets. Columbia, with Miles Davis and Duke Ellington in its catalog, was a "serious label." This status of seriousness raised the value of the entire Columbia brand, including its mass hits. The prestige catalog generated not direct profit but a reputation of seriousness for the label, which in turn raised the value of all the label's other releases. This is standard advertising work: an image investment that pays back through a cross-effect on sales of the main line. The Chamber's criterion threatened the advertising function of the prestige catalog. If public recognition of musicians (a star on the boulevard) is defined only through sales, then Miles Davis and Mahalia Jackson do not receive that recognition, and the prestige catalog ceases to function as an image asset for the label. The labels' advertising investment in the serious repertoire loses its payoff.

In this specific situation, a group of executives from the five largest recording companies took an institutional decision. The founders of the future Recording Academy were Jesse Kaye (MGM Records), Lloyd Dunn and Richard Jones (Capitol Records), Sonny Burke and Milt Gabler (Decca Records), Dennis Farnon (RCA Records), and Axel Stordahl, Paul Weston and Doris Day (Columbia Records) [1]. Technically they stated the task as a supplement to the Chamber's work: to create a separate ceremony where musicians who did not fall under the million-sales threshold could be recognized. Structurally, the task was commercial. A label is a commercial enterprise, and any institution founded by commercial corporations serves first and foremost their commercial interests. The contrary claim would require demonstrating that the founders acted against their primary obligations to shareholders. The structural task of the five labels in 1957 was to restore the advertising function of the prestige catalog through an institutional mechanism of their own. Public recognition of musicians had ceased to coincide automatically with sales, and the labels needed an alternative certifying institution so that the prestige catalog would keep working as an image asset.

This was an act of taking the function away from one institution (the Chamber, operating in the regime of direct market democracy) and re-founding it in another. The new institution (the Academy) operated in a regime of representative peer democracy, but in institutional substance it was a corporate cycle of symbolic certification: a closed commercial infrastructure in which the five labels control the certifying institution so as to recover, downstream, the increased value of certified products. On May 28, 1957, the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences was registered in Los Angeles. The first ceremony took place on May 4, 1959. There were 28 statuettes. The name "Grammy" came from "gramophone." The electorate then numbered roughly 2,000 people. There was as yet no television broadcast: the ceremony was a narrow industry event.

The formula of the sacred pole, fixed in the statutory documents, acquires a precise meaning in this genealogy. "Artistic achievement without regard to album sales or chart position" [1] is not an abstract definition of excellence. It is the direct antithesis of the Chamber's specific criterion. "Without regard to sales" reads literally: without reference to the principle on which the Walk of Fame operated. The Academy declared itself an institution that defines recognition not by sales but by something else. What exactly, the formula does not say. Positive content of the sacred is not articulated. The sacred pole is defined by negating the criterion the previous arbiter used.

A key feature: the appropriation of the function was framed not as an open pedagogical claim ("we know better what good music is, and we will teach the audience to distinguish"), but as the peer-language of professional recognition ("artists and creators recognizing each other within their industry"). An open pedagogical claim would have met resistance: the Chamber of Commerce had public legitimacy as a city-arbiter, while the five labels had no right to publicly declare themselves above the mass market. The peer-language sidestepped that conflict. Formally the Academy did not claim to shape mass taste; it stated intra-guild recognition. In fact, through representative peer democracy and the taste-shaping infrastructure that built up in the industrial structure over the following decades, the Academy did shape mass taste. One thing was declared; another was happening.

In this architecture of the founding act there is already present what the report's methodology defines as the constitutive undeclarability of the pedagogical mandate. Undeclarability here is not accidental and not a feature of early leadership's style; it is an architectural element of the founding act. Open acknowledgment of the pedagogical function would have required public articulation of what exactly the institution had taken away from the Chamber in 1957. And such articulation at that moment would have been politically impossible: the five labels could not have announced that they were taking the right to shape taste away from an institution with a transparent market criterion in order to restore the advertising function of their own prestige catalogs. To openly state "we are creating an advertising instrument" would have nullified the symbolic effect of certification: if the Grammy stamp is publicly recognized as an advertising label, the audience reads it as such, and the effect of raising product value disappears. Certification works only as long as it publicly looks not like certification but like recognition. Undeclarability was not a strategic mask but a necessary condition for the corporate cycle of symbolic certification to work at all. It functioned as structural defense: so long as the institution did not discuss what it does in culture and for whom, the genealogy did not become disputable, and the advertising effect of certification persisted.

This structural feature would govern the Academy's behavior for all seventy years of its existence, through the 2018–2022 moment. The institution could not publicly defend its pedagogical function without exposing the genealogy. That is precisely why the defense of the second phase ran not through explicit affirmation of the pedagogical role and its modernization (as would have been possible for Iowa MFA or NEA), but through the construction of a false history of the institution's own bias. This move is examined in detail in sections III and IV; here it is important to fix its root. The root lies in the founding act of 1957.

Who the founders were: five labels, not critics and not listeners

Who created the award matters for its subsequent history. The founders were not critics, not listeners, not an audience, and not academic theorists of music. The founders were top executives of five commercial labels whose professional interest consisted in selling music. The people who formulated the principle of "peer review without regard to sales" earned their living precisely through sales. This is a structural contradiction from the beginning. The principle of "artistic achievement without regard to album sales or chart position" [1] was written by people who had no independent conception of "artistic achievement" apart from their labels' corporate sense of proper music.

This conception did not reduce to "what sells." It had its own structure, plainly visible in Columbia Records in 1957. Mitch Miller, head of A&R at Columbia from 1950 until 1965, kept Mahalia Jackson, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and classical pianists as prestige corporate capital. Their sales were moderate, but their names were important to the label as a mark of seriousness. At the same time, Miller personally rejected Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and The Beatles, and publicly called rock'n'roll "musical illiteracy" and "not music, a disease." All three rejected projects became the largest commercial phenomena of the era, and his refusal cost Columbia its market position for years. So the head of A&R of one of the five founding labels had his own filter of "proper music," which partly correlated with sales (the genres of the prestige catalog brought in steady income) and partly contradicted them (mass commercial hits of the new era were rejected on aesthetic grounds).

That filter was what the top executives might have called artistic achievement. But putting that into the statutes of an industry award publicly was impossible. "Artistic achievement is what our label considers serious music" cannot be written. Each label considered different music serious. Columbia, RCA, Decca, Capitol, and MGM had different corporate catalogs. "Artistic achievement is what sells" cannot be written either: then a separate award is not needed, since commercial charts already exist. Only one path remains. Define the sacred negatively, by excluding commercial success as a criterion, while saying nothing about what takes its place.

The sacred code: definition by absence

The statutory formulation of the mission contained a key syntactic feature. The sacred was defined only negatively. Not through positive content ("artistic achievement is such-and-such"), but by excluding a single parameter ("without regard to album sales or chart position"). The formulation answered the question "what do we stand against," not "what do we support." Commercial success was declared profane. The sacred occupied the opposite place, but the sacred itself was missing.

This emptiness was not an accident but a constructive decision. The authors of the statute could not define "artistic excellence" substantively for one simple reason: their own everyday business consisted in promoting what sells. Any substantive definition of excellence that did not coincide with sales would have undermined their own practice. Any definition that coincided with sales would have undermined the separate existence of the award. One way out: leave the sacred signifier empty and hand its content over to the voting procedure. The procedure created the impression that competent peers knew what excellence was, without formulating it publicly. The impression was enough, so long as the peers voted in coordination.

This decision did more than resolve a logical contradiction. It removed the five labels from external arbitration. If "artistic achievement" had been defined substantively, the definition could have been contested, the Academy could have been found non-compliant with its own criterion, an alternative arbiter more capable of judging could have been appointed. An empty signifier does not permit this: a criterion that does not exist cannot be contested. That was precisely what the five labels had wanted from the beginning: an arbiter of their own, not delegated to anyone outside. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, critics, radio stations, Billboard charts remained external players. The Academy was the industry's internal instrument, and the empty sacred signifier guaranteed that this instrument stayed under its control. A substantive definition would have turned the Academy into an organization accountable to a criterion. The empty signifier left the Academy accountable only to its own procedure, which in turn rested in the hands of the founding labels.

The sacred pole of 1957–1990: artistic achievement, peer recognition, professional craft, authenticity of creation. The profane pole: sales, chart position, commercial hype, mass-market exploitation, fabrication. The pair was workable. It allowed the institution to reward artists who sold, artists who did not sell, and artists who sold too well, while reserving the right to separate one from the other without explaining the principle of separation.

SettledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) culture and the invisible criterion

By the 1970s the code operated in a clean settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) mode. No one asked by what criteria the Academy preferred one thing to another. The answer lay in the ritual itself: peers voted, they knew. Bourdieu supplied the academic term for such a mechanism: a set of symbolic capitals recognizes itself in a mirror. Professional producers and engineers hear, in a colleague's recording, a quality a non-professional cannot hear. The Academy did not publish criteria because the criteria lived in the habitus of peers, not in a document.

The electorate of the first decades consisted of people whose professional biographies intersected within one small geographic and social milieu. There were three American musical centers at the time: Los Angeles, New York, and Nashville. These were engineers and producers who worked in the same studios and knew the same tradition of popular American music. They did not coordinate their criteria deliberately. Criteria were held in common because the formative experience was held in common. SettledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) culture worked in the strict Swidlerian sense: the habitus worked invisibly because it remained shared across everyone in the room.

This period produced a series of laureates whose names would later become anchors of the Academy's retrospective legitimacy. Ella Fitzgerald in 1959. Stevie Wonder, three-time Album of the Year in the 1970s. Paul Simon. Quincy Jones. Michael Jackson. A list that in the 2020s would be cited as evidence that "the Academy once knew what it was doing." Each such name functions as testimony of historical competence. The roll of names performs the function that the empty sacred signifier cannot perform: it contains a definition of excellence, at least by pointing.

The pedagogical mandate and the taste-shaping instruments

SettledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) culture alone is not enough to explain how a peer community in Los Angeles and New York reconciled its choices with the choices of the mass American audience over seventy years. Seventy years is far too long for coincidence. The convergence was not symmetric but vertical. The peer elite did not coincide with the mass audience; it shaped its taste. The Academy acted as teacher, the mass audience as pupil. The school model, in which the upper class knows better and transmits knowledge to the lower, operated in popular American music up to the digital revolution.

In terms of the three regimes of cultural recognition, Grammy of 1957–2000 is the regime of representative peer democracy. The five founding labels appropriated the recognition function from the Chamber of Commerce in 1957 and re-founded it in peer form. But the appropriation was a constitutive gesture, one-time. Holding the function required long institutional work to build an infrastructure through which representative peer choice could turn into mass habit. Without such infrastructure, peer representation would have remained an intramural recognition, powerless in the culture at large. The taste-shaping instruments of 1957–2000 are precisely that infrastructure.

The work of the pedagogical mandate required infrastructure. A peer decision had to acquire public visibility in order to form mass habit. The taste-shaping instruments of 1957–2000 comprised several layers operating in concert.

First layer: radio. Top 40 radio from the 1950s selected records through a combination of label pluggers and station programme directors. Records that did not pass this filter did not reach the mass audience in comparable volume. Columbia, RCA, Decca, Capitol, and MGM had direct channels for promotion into radio rotation, and the peer decisions of the major labels turned into radio habit for the mass audience with a lag of several months.

Second layer: television. MTV from 1981 added a visual layer to taste-shaping. Video clips were selected by the channel's program directors, and their choices structured what teenagers of the 1980s considered current music. The CBS Grammy broadcast (from 1973) operated as an annual taste-shaping summit: the Academy's choice received national visibility in prime time.

Third layer: print criticism. Rolling Stone, Billboard, Down Beat, and later SPIN, Musician, and Creem formed the critical language through which the educated mass audience learned to distinguish "important" from "unimportant." Critics worked in circles close to the producer peer community, often shared their social world, and the critical language was relatively aligned with the peer language.

Fourth layer: label catalogs. The five founding labels produced their own reissues, boxed sets, and retrospectives that shaped the canon. When Columbia in 1990 released the Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson, it was a peer statement that Johnson was part of the canon. The catalog functioned as a textbook, prescribing which recordings one had to know.

Fifth layer: live infrastructure. Major artist tours, festivals, and late-night TV performances ran through a system of industry partners in which the peer decisions of the labels determined who got the larger stages.

All five layers together operated as a pedagogical system. The peer community of the industry did not need public articulation of excellence criteria, because the system itself transmitted peer choice into mass habit. The criterion of excellence lived in the habitus of peers, and the habitus was replicated through the infrastructure. This is what the report calls the pedagogical mandate: the institution's capacity to shape taste through taste-shaping instruments without having to formulate the criterion publicly.

The empty sacred signifier of 1957 was workable for seventy years precisely because of this mandate. The audience did not need to know what excellence was, because the institution knew, and its knowledge turned into a habit of listening. In the settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) period no one asked about the criterion, because the infrastructure transmitted the results of peer choice without questions. Mitch Miller in 1957 did not publish his filter of "proper music," but Columbia, through its catalog, through radio promotion, through MTV in the 1980s, made Miller's peer choice the mass musical culture of Americans for two generations.

The taste-shaping infrastructure was not built as an autonomous pedagogical system. It was part of the corporate cycle of symbolic certification, within which pedagogy functioned as a working condition of the advertising work. Radio rotation depended commercially on labels (through pluggers and promo budgets). MTV received video clips from labels and depended on their cooperation. Criticism at Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Down Beat formed in social circles overlapping with the industry; reviews became part of promo strategy. The CBS broadcast was an advertising contract: the network bought broadcast rights to the ceremony, and the labels received national visibility for their certified products. Major-label catalogs as canon were commercial reissues forming a sellable repertoire. All five layers not only transmitted peer choice; they simultaneously sold the labels' products. Pedagogy was a subordinate function of this commercial loop: as long as the mass audience was trained to regard Grammy choices as correct, the Grammy stamp sold. The moment the audience stopped treating peer choice as correct, the advertising effect of certification would start to fade. Pedagogy existed only to the extent that it supported the work of the corporate cycle.

This mechanism worked so long as the taste-shaping instruments remained in the hands of the industry. When in 2000–2015 the infrastructure fragmented through platforms (Napster, iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok), the peer elite lost its taste-shaping instruments. Algorithmic aggregation of listening replaced radio rotation. Social networks and viral content replaced MTV as a means of visual promotion. Online criticism (Pitchfork, Anthony Fantano, TikTok trends) fragmented and partly displaced print criticism. The music audience received tools of its own choice before the peer elite adapted to the loss of the instruments of pedagogical control.

The fragmentation dismantled two levels simultaneously. The first level: the pedagogical function (peer choice stopped turning into mass habit). The second level: the corporate cycle of symbolic certification (the Grammy stamp stopped working as a trust signal, because the audience had obtained alternative evaluation mechanisms through platforms). This is an important qualification of the first-phase analysis. The Academy was losing not only a pedagogical function in isolation; it was losing a working corporate cycle. Pedagogy was the subordinate part of the cycle, and its loss was the consequence of a wider systemic shift. Labels stopped receiving from Grammy the advertising return on investment they had before. A certified album no longer automatically sees the same scale of sales lift (streaming economics pays differently, and the Grammy effect within it is weaker than in the physical-sales model). This economic reality determines how the Academy will behave in the second phase: the reform will look for a new certification language, not a new pedagogy.

In the terms of the three regimes of cultural recognition this was not merely a technological shift. It was a return to direct democracy in a new infrastructural form. The Chamber of Commerce in 1956 worked through a direct market criterion (one million copies sold). Platforms in 2015 work through a direct algorithmic criterion (counts of streams, views, shares). Between them lie sixty years of representative peer democracy, during which the Academy and its taste-shaping infrastructure held the function of recognition in representative form. The fragmentation of taste-shaping instruments is the dismantling of that representative form and the return to direct democracy. The Academy found itself in a position structurally identical to the Chamber's in 1957, only with the inverse sign: the function of recognition was being taken away from it in favor of another regime.

The shift was not only instrumental but economic. Napster from 1999 collapsed the revenue model in which labels earned on the sale of albums as physical objects. iTunes from 2003 partly restored monetization, but at the price of unbundling the album: the buyer bought a track, not an album, which devalued the architecture within which the peer community of producers had constructed value. Spotify from 2008 established a new streaming economy with per-stream shares radically smaller than the labels' prior margins. The cumulative effect: the recording industry entered a long period of contraction in which personnel resources, A&R investment, and the capacity to sustain high-risk projects shrank. The peer elite was losing not only its taste-shaping instruments but the economic base on which industrial power rested. The reform that would have required resource investment in new taste-shaping infrastructure (peer-curated digital platforms, new formats of criticism, renewal of A&R personnel for the new media environment) did not launch in that economy, because the priority was survival, not investment.

The platforms that took the place of industrial taste-shaping instruments produce a non-pedagogical shaping of taste. Spotify's algorithm does not "recommend the best"; it recommends what produces engagement. It recommends what is already being listened to, which amplifies existing patterns and does not create a new hierarchy between "important" and "unimportant." TikTok trends work through viral propagation, not through expert judgment. Pitchfork and Anthony Fantano produce individual assessments but not an institutional mandate: Fantano is a critic with subscribers, not an institution with public legitimacy to judge on behalf of a community. Platform aggregation of taste performs the function of distribution (what millions will hear), but not the function of formation (what becomes canonical, against which one learns to discriminate). This is a structural difference: the peer elite lost its instruments not because they passed to other pedagogical institutions, but because the new infrastructure is not pedagogical by type. That fact substantially constrains the possibility of restoring the mandate in the prior form: even if the Academy had modernized in the 2010s, it would have run up against an infrastructure that does not fit into peer logic.

A detailed examination of this phase appears in section III.

1989: the first divergence between peer review and crowd review

In 1989 the first institutional event occurred that fixed the divergence between Grammy's two rituals. The Nominations Review Committees were introduced as a procedural answer to a problem the industry could not formulate publicly [a]. The problem was that a mass vote of 8,000 members sometimes produced results that reflected popularity rather than professional judgment of excellence. The mass vote worked by crowd logic. A filter was needed to return the result to peer logic.

The official explanation for introducing the committees in 1989 appealed to genre categories: genre experts select nominees within a genre better. The mechanics worked as follows. An anonymous group of 15–30 people received the result of the mass vote of 8,000 members and resorted it if the result diverged from professional judgment. In most cases the committee agreed with the mass vote. It intervened only on divergence.

The Big Four ran without a filter until 1995. In 1995 the mass vote gave Album of the Year to 68-year-old Tony Bennett for "MTV Unplugged," an album of American standards of the 1930s–50s rendered in a chamber jazz style. In that same year of 1994, the Billboard charts and MTV rotation were held by Pearl Jam's "Vitalogy," Green Day's "Dookie," Soundgarden's "Superunknown," and Nirvana's "In Utero." Critics at Rolling Stone and SPIN noted: the Academy's electorate was voting by the reflexes of the pre-rock era. The Academy's board extended the committees to the Big Four to correct the old-fashioned majority toward a more contemporary peer consensus [a].

The structural logic of this setup is as follows. The institution's sacred signifier is empty. There is no substantive definition of excellence. Therefore excellence is determined by procedure: mass vote plus corrective committee. The committees worked as a mechanism for maintaining the professional habitus, not as a political filter. They reproduced what the 1957 founders had not explicitly defined: a tacit expert consensus that had taken shape historically in the labels and studios.

A brief comparison with Iowa MFA. Iowa has a mechanism for cultivating a peer: a two-year workshop reshapes the student's reflexes toward a common habitus. Grammy has no such mechanism. A new Academy member is not raised; they are recommended and admitted to the vote. The 1989 committees were an acknowledgment of that deficit. Since the electorate cannot be raised into a single habitus, its vote is left as a ritual of legitimacy, and decisions at moments of divergence are handed to a narrow group whose habitus has already formed in the labels and studios.

1990: Milli Vanilli and the first restoration of performance through ritual

In February 1990 Milli Vanilli received the Grammy for Best New Artist. In November of that year, producer Frank Farian admitted that Rob Pilatus and Fab Morvan had not sung on their own album: the vocals belonged to other performers. A few days later the Academy rescinded the award. This was, and remains, the only Grammy ever revoked in the award's history [8].

The episode matters for the Alexandrian account in two ways. First: the binary code functioned precisely according to its own logic. Milli Vanilli violated the sacred pole (authenticity of creation) fundamentally. They were not the creators of what had been presented as their work. The recall of the award was a ritual act of purification. The Academy was literally restoring the integrity of the sacred category through the public extraction of the profane object. This is the classical Durkheimian mechanism described by Alexander: ritual punishment of the violator reaffirms the boundary of the code for everyone else.

The second important feature of the episode is that the violation was publicly formulable. Farian admitted the deception in interviews. The Academy could cite a specific rule ("the criteria for the Grammys is that you have to sing on the record," as Morvan himself later formulated it) and point to its violation. A public explanation of the revocation was possible because a justification existed. The empty sacred signifier was not touched in this episode: the issue was not what excellence is, but the violation of a minimal procedural basis of peer review — vocal attribution. The revocation worked as a ritual of purification, not as a ritual of definition.

The Academy emerged from the episode strengthened. The performance was restored through dramatic action. The audience saw that Grammy was prepared to revoke an award for the sake of defending the sacred. This confirmed that the sacred existed and was being guarded. The ironic residue is this. After 1990, the Academy never once revoked a Grammy again, even though occasions arose (and occasions more serious than the Milli Vanilli case). The ritual of purification was used once, played its public role, and was set aside. The fact that it was set aside will become significant in 2018, when the Academy faces a violation of the sacred for which the mechanism of purification is no longer suited. The violator is not an agent (as Milli Vanilli were), but the institution's own procedure.

The television ritual: a second audience, a second sacredness

From 1973 Grammy has been broadcast on CBS [a]. That event radically changes the structure of the ritual, though not immediately visibly. Before 1973 Grammy was one ritual for one audience: a closed peer consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) for the industry. After 1973 a second ritual appeared alongside it: an open ceremonial broadcast for a television audience, initially of about 15–20 million viewers, then more.

The two rituals use the same central act, the awarding of a statuette, but produce different sacred objects for different audiences. The internal audience (Academy members, the industry, the music press) sees the statuette as a mark of collegial recognition. The external audience (the mass viewer) sees it as a mark that this album or this artist has been proclaimed the year's main musical event. These are different things. The first requires trust in the competence of the voting peers. The second requires trust that the Academy chooses what is recognizable as the main musical event.

Until 2018 the two rituals worked synchronously. Most laureates of the Big Four in the 1970s–2010s were simultaneously commercially successful and professionally respected. The synchronization between peer consensus and popular recognition was so stable that its absence (as in 1995 with Tony Bennett, or in 2014 with Macklemore) felt precisely as a breakdown, not as the norm. The synchrony worked in both directions. The mass audience saw a familiar name on the stage and received confirmation that peers had chosen precisely what the public already considered the main thing. The industry saw that its choice was publicly endorsed by the mass audience, and that reinforced the prestige of the peer vote.

The dual ritual worked for seventy years precisely on this synchrony. When the synchrony is broken (2018, Variety's question: "why are there so few women among the laureates"), the two rituals will begin to diverge, and each will expose a vulnerability of its own that was hidden as long as the two coincided.

II. The first fracture: the 2018 press conference

The event

The 60th Grammy ceremony took place on January 28, 2018. Among the televised-broadcast laureates there was one woman [a]. At the post-ceremony press conference, a Variety journalist asked Neil Portnow, the Academy's president since 2002, about the causes of the gender imbalance. Portnow's answer contained a phrase that within a few hours became a headline: women need to "step up," to try harder [a][2][3].

From an Alexandrian standpoint what matters is not the substance of that remark (it is trivial, and said without evident intent), but its performative effect. During the press conference the head of the institution publicly articulated a diagnosis of the institution's internal work. The diagnosis placed the cause of the imbalanced outcome on insufficient effort by one of the sides. It was a formulation of a criterion after the fact. A criterion that explains why so few women are among the laureates was uttered precisely in the moment when the institution could not afford any formulation that did not sound like an apology. The very act of formulating it shattered the settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) culture inside which the criterion had never been articulated.

The mechanism of the performative breakdown

In Alexander's terms, what occurred was a destruction of authenticity. A performance works when the audience believes the performer himself believes what he is performing. Until 2018 Portnow had played the role of head of the institution, guarding the sacred signifier of excellence. He was not required to formulate the substance of this sacred, and the audience did not demand it, because settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) culture rested on tacit trust: the institution knows what it is doing. The 2018 press conference placed Portnow in a situation where settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) trust had already been broken (an obvious imbalance), and an explanation was required. The explanation he gave was not an explanation of the institution's mechanism but a transfer of responsibility to external agents (women artists). That destroyed authenticity in two ways. The audience saw that the head of the institution had no account of his own of the mechanism. The audience also saw that his first reflex in a crisis was to shift blame.

A second layer of the same breakdown: Portnow uttered a phrase that instantly became ritually toxic. In the post-2017 cultural environment (post-Weinstein, post-MeToo), the phrase "step up" for women had become career-poisonous for any male executive who said it in a gender context. Portnow apparently did not know this, was not keeping it in focus, or spoke on autopilot. The audience that heard the phrase instantly coded it as a signal from another era — an era when the head of a major industry institution could shift structural problems onto the individual effort of an oppressed group with no consequences. It was evidence that the institution was operating by rules the audience had already classed as invalid. The performative breakdown lay not in content but in date-stamp: Portnow was speaking the language of 1995 in the situation of 2018.

Reaction: a break in the peer connection with part of the community

Within a month of the press conference, Portnow received three open letters from collectives of executives, 30,000 signatures on a resignation petition, and accusations of financial wrongdoing [a][2][3]. It matters how this pressure was structured. The initiative came not from the mass audience (CBS viewers), but from part of the industry (women executives at labels, producers, artists). That meant the first audience to refuse to participate in the ritual was precisely the peer audience, the internal one. The 2018 television audience fell from 26.1 million (2017) to 19.8 million, a drop of 24.1% [a], but that was a reflection of an already-occurred internal break, not an autonomous external event.

In Cultural DiamondFour poles of a cultural object: creator, object, receiver, social world (Griswold) terms, the break occurred along the creator ↔ receiver axis inside the peer ritual. Creator (the Academy performing the peer-consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) ritual) and Receiver (peers accepting this ritual as a legitimate act of recognition) ceased to be coordinated. Part of the peer community publicly declared that the ritual was no longer a peer consensus but a reproduction of exclusion. In that moment the Academy lost what it had possessed until 2018: the presumption that its vote representatively represents a collegial community. The presumption was destroyed not from outside but by one phrase from within, uttered by the head of the institution.

Structural significance: the speaking emptiness

From an Alexandrian standpoint the 2018 episode demonstrates a specific vulnerability of a code whose center remains empty. As long as excellence is not defined, it is protected: there is nothing substantive to criticize. But the moment external pressure forces leadership to formulate a criterion, any formulation becomes vulnerable. Portnow uttered the phrase "step up," which was not a formulation of an excellence criterion, but was perceived as an attempt to explain the mechanism of selection. The perceived phrase became the object of criticism. The Academy found itself in a position where its actual criterion (emptiness, covered by procedure) cannot be openly defended (because emptiness is not defensible), and any temporary formulation is instantly attacked.

This is the classical dynamic of unsettledHabitus broken or threatened; manifestos and declarations signal instability (Swidler) culture in Swidler's terms. In a settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) period the institution did not need an explicit ideology: the habitus worked invisibly. In the moment of transition to unsettledHabitus broken or threatened; manifestos and declarations signal instability (Swidler) (provoked by a public question), the institution is forced to formulate ideology, and any formulation becomes visible, and therefore contestable. Portnow could not say "we have no criteria, and that is fine." He said what he said. And that was instantly recorded as the institution's official position.

The Board's response: the start of an institutional transition

The Academy's board of directors did not dismiss Portnow in February 2018. Instead the Board required him to establish an independent Task Force led by Tina Tchen (co-founder of the Time's Up movement), which was to develop recommendations on diversity and inclusion [a]. Portnow's contract was not renewed in May 2018, and in July 2019 he left the post.

At that moment the Academy had a choice between two structurally different paths. The first path: acknowledge the missed modernization and defend the pedagogical function at the cost of a reduced audience. The Academy could have publicly said: the peer community did not renew itself in time for the new media environment; we will now be an institution of smaller reach but with a preserved expert function. Acknowledge that Portnow had said an unfortunate phrase, replace him quietly, and continue working as a peer institution that is under no obligation to apologize for the mechanism of its own peer vote. That path would have cost reputational losses and a partial drop in audience, but it would have preserved the institution as the keeper of its own function.

The second path: public redefinition of the former function as untenable. Acknowledge that the Academy's peer mechanism is itself problematic, hire an external commission to correct the institution, and begin publicly rebuilding itself in the language of apology. This path was chosen. The Tchen Task Force structurally meant that the Academy accepted a frame in which its peer function is suspect and in need of external correction. This is the first institutional step toward public abdication of responsibility for the pedagogical function. Not yet final (the 2020–2022 reform was still two years away), but already setting the direction.

Between the two paths there is a substantial structural difference. The first path acknowledges the missed modernization as the Academy's own failure and absorbs the costs for itself. The second path hides the missed modernization by reformulating it as a moral necessity to correct prior injustice. The first leaves the institution with a reduced but recognizable function. The second leaves the institution without the function for which it had existed. The choice of the second path is not neutral with respect to the first phase: it makes that phase impossible to publicly discuss, because to acknowledge the missed modernization after publicly saying "our prior procedure was unjust" is to admit that the 2020–2022 reform was a framingA ready-made interpretation: who is to blame, what to do, why act now (Snow & Benford) of the Academy's own failure, not its correction. The Academy precluded such an acknowledgment already in 2018, when it appointed the Tchen Task Force as an external commission over its own procedure.

The Task Force reported in March 2019. Eighteen recommendations addressed membership, voting, and governance [a]. The recommendations would later become the road map of the DEI reform, but at the moment of their publication the Academy did not yet have a CEO ready to implement them. Portnow was on his way out. His successor Deborah Dugan was meant to lead implementation, but her own appointment turned into the next episode of the institutional crisis. By the time the Task Force's recommendations began to be implemented in fact, the Academy already had a new CEO (Harvey Mason Jr.), and the recommendations, originally written by Tchen for the 2018 situation, were being implemented in a very different situation: the situation of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd.

It is precisely this historical delay (2019 recommendations executed in the context of 2020) that became the structural source of what happened at the Academy in 2020–2022. The Task Force implementation coincided with the peak of the BLM mobilization, and the two originally independent processes became entangled. The Academy was carrying out a 2018 plan, written for a gender imbalance, but carrying it out within the 2020 frame that redrew every institutional reform through a racial lens.

The 2018 ratings drop: independent evidence

The television audience fell from 26.1 million viewers in 2017 to 19.8 million in 2018, −24.1% [a]. This drop occurred before any reforms, before Mason, before the dissolution of the committees, before the new membership. It happened in the moment of and immediately after the press conference. The claim that the 2020–2021 reforms "killed" Grammy's television audience is historically inaccurate: the largest drop occurred in 2018, when no reforms were yet in place. The audience was leaving not "new Grammy" but the fact that Grammy itself had become a stage for public political dysfunction.

For an Alexandrian analysis this matters. The 2018 telecast ratings register that the external ceremonial ritual began to break down simultaneously with the internal peer ritual, but for a different reason. The peer audience turned away from Portnow because of his phrase (perceived as an archaic shifting of blame). The mass audience turned away from Grammy because the event itself had become a public arena of institutional dysfunction. The second phenomenon is broader: a viewer who turns on the television for entertainment does not need a ceremony that the news discusses as a scandal. Six point three million people did not tune in in 2018 not because they voted against DEI (which as an institutional function did not exist in the Academy in 2018), but because Grammy had stopped being a celebration and had become a news story.

This created a particular configuration in 2019. A new CEO was entering a situation where both rituals were already damaged. The peer ritual had been damaged by internal pressure on a leadership that could not formulate its own criteria. The ceremonial ritual had been damaged by a mass audience exodus provoked by the mere fact of the scandal. Dugan's task, and then Mason's, was not to change anything; it was to restore both rituals. We will see in section IV how the attempt to restore them led to a second de-fusion rather than a re-fusion.

III. The Dugan episode: the ritual expulsion of the outside reformer (2019–2020)

Appointing an outside reformer

In August 2019 Deborah Dugan was appointed President/CEO of the Recording Academy, the first woman to hold that post in the institution's sixty-two-year history [a]. Her biography had been framed as the biography of a reformer. Eight years leading (RED), the international anti-AIDS organization founded by Bono, during which more than $500 million in corporate funds were raised under her direction, had shaped her public profile as a manager of major transformations.

Dugan's appointment was the Board's attempt to hand the implementation of the eighteen Tchen recommendations to an outside executor. The logic is standard for organizations in institutional crisis: an internal actor cannot lead a reform because he is bound to the prior settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) culture; an outside actor arrives without those ties and can become the face of the institution's new identity. A classic case of a McKinsey-style external CEO hired for the unpleasant task of changing the culture.

Dugan held the post for 169 days [a].

The expulsion

On January 16, 2020, four days before the ceremony, Dugan was removed from her post [a]. The stated pretext was a complaint by her former assistant to internal HR alleging bullying. On January 21, five days after her removal, Dugan filed a 46-page complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission [a][5]. Her complaint contained three blocks of allegations. First: sexual harassment by General Counsel Joel Katz. Second: conflicts of interest in the shaping of nominations, with members of the board promoting artists to whom they had personal or business ties. Third: a "boys club" culture at the executive level.

All three blocks the Academy denied and continues to deny to this day [a]. The dispute was not resolved in court: in June 2021 the Academy settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) with Dugan for $5.75 million without acknowledging the allegations [a].

What matters for the Alexandrian frame is not the truth of the allegations (which has not been publicly established), but the performative effect of the episode. At the moment when the institution was supposed to be demonstrating the implementation of its diversity reform, its own external reformer had been publicly expelled under scandalous conditions. Dugan, hired for that implementation, immediately levelled against the institution allegations structurally identical to those that had made the reform necessary in the first place: allegations of sexual harassment, of a boys-club mentality, of the exclusion of women from decision-making.

The expulsion ritual and its structural function

In Alexander's terms, the Dugan episode was a ritual of expulsion, akin to the expulsion of Milli Vanilli in 1990, but with the opposite structure. Milli Vanilli were violators of the sacred code (authenticity of creation); their expulsion fortified the code. Dugan was a reformer hired to change the code; her expulsion placed the institution in a position where it could not simultaneously assert "we are reforming" and "our reformer turned out to be the problem." The Academy chose the latter. That created the need to explain how the reform could continue without a reformer.

The explanation turned out to be a structurally necessary step that led to Harvey Mason Jr. The Academy could not bring Portnow back (he had left, and his return would have amounted to admitting that all the efforts of 2018 had failed). The Academy could not launch a new external search in open-recruitment mode (that would have repeated the Dugan mistake and publicly confirmed that the reform could not find an executor). One option remained: install an insider already on the board. Mason had been chair of the Board of Trustees since June 2019. He had sat on the Recording Academy Board since 2009, and on the Los Angeles chapter since 2007 [a]. He was an insider, but a young insider, a Black American, a producer whose career had been built on work with African American artists. In the moment of the BLM mobilization (May–June 2020), his candidacy carried additional symbolic weight.

A double handover of control

Structurally, what happened at the Academy in January 2020 was a double handover. Officially, Mason was appointed Interim President/CEO. In practice, he received the mandate to carry out the reform Dugan had not managed to implement. He was already chair of the Board, and in his hands two types of authority converged that, in a normal corporate structure, are separated: the executive authority of the CEO and the oversight authority of the chair. The concentration was temporary in form (while the search for a permanent CEO continued), but in fact it lasted seventeen months, until his appointment as permanent CEO in May 2021 [a].

A brief digression on the man who was about to lead the reform. Mason was born in 1968 in Boston, son of the jazz drummer Harvey Mason Sr. (founder of Fourplay, session musician with Quincy Jones and Herbie Hancock). He grew up in Los Angeles, went with his father to recording sessions with Quincy Jones, Carole King, and The Brothers Johnson. He played on the University of Arizona basketball team (1988 Final Four, on the same squad as Steve Kerr and Sean Elliott). From 2000 he ran the production duo The Underdogs with Damon Thomas. Mason's production credits before joining the Academy: "Say My Name" (Destiny's Child), "It's Not Right, But It's Okay" (Whitney Houston), "No Air" (Jordin Sparks & Chris Brown), "I Look to You" (Whitney Houston, her last recordings before her death), "Hollywood Tonight" (Michael Jackson, posthumous album). Film soundtracks: Dreamgirls (2006), Pitch Perfect (2012, 2015, 2017), Straight Outta Compton (2015), Sing (2016), Respect (2021). Work with Beyoncé (including "Listen" for Dreamgirls), Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, John Legend [15].

Mason's filter is a dense one: mainstream R&B and pop, emotionally affective balladry, film and television soundtracks, biographical biopics, African American artists and artists working at the seam of R&B, pop, and hip-hop. This is a specific aesthetic and industrial type. The parallel to Mitch Miller from section I becomes structurally clearer. Both men had their own filter for the right music. In 1957 Miller did not need to put the filter down on paper in public, because the Academy's pedagogical mandate was at full strength: Columbia, through its channels of taste-shaping, turned Miller's peer selections into the mass musical culture of Americans, and a separate public statement along the lines of "here is what artistic achievement is" was unnecessary. By 2020 the situation was fundamentally different. Mason found himself at the head of an institution whose pedagogical mandate was no longer working (the taste-shaping instruments had been dismantled by digital platforms), and whose Board had already been moving along the second path for two years (see section II). Mason's filter could not be publicly written down — not because each participating label has its own filter (the 1957 problem). The reason is different. Any public formulation of a pedagogical criterion in 2020 would have immediately run into the question of by what right the Academy still claimed a pedagogical position at all, given that it had failed to defend one. Mason's decision in 2020–2022 is a choice within an already-set trajectory: how deep and how quickly to formalize the redefinition of the function.

Deeper still lies another structural layer that explains why modernization could not have been launched even under different leadership and different tactics. The missed modernization of 2000–2015 was not only the inertia of a successful era and not only a failure to recognize the shift. It was blocked by the constitutive undeclarability of the pedagogical mandate. To modernize the pedagogical function for the new media environment, the peer elite would first have had to name that function publicly. To acknowledge: "we are the institution that shapes mass taste; the infrastructure through which we did this is disappearing; we need a new one." But such an acknowledgment would have opened up the 1957 genealogy in its first seconds. The question "by what right do you shape taste" would have pulled after it the question "where did you take that right from." And that last question leads back to the story of the function being seized from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce so that the advertising function of the five majors' prestige catalogs could be restored. The Academy could not articulate its own pedagogical function, because articulating it would have exposed the genealogy. Seventy years of undeclaredness had been working as an architectural safeguard: so long as the function is not named, the question of its origin does not arise. Modernization required breaching that safeguard. The institution did not take that step, and this was not a tactical oversight but a structural impossibility. The peer elite could see the infrastructure slipping, could discuss it internally. But to turn that perception into a public reform would have meant stepping out of the mode in which the Academy is constituted.

That is precisely why the first phase of 2000–2015 ended without an institutional response. And that is why, in the second phase of 2018–2022, the defense was mounted not through an open articulation of the pedagogical function (which, for the same reason, would have been impossible), but through the construction of a fabricated history of the institution's own bias. A fabricated history was a move compatible with undeclaredness: it allowed the institution to speak about its past in moral terms (the DEI frame) without speaking about it in genealogical terms (who seized what function from whom, and when). The Academy defended itself in the one language that did not require a public acknowledgment of a pedagogical role. The language of a fabricated history left undeclaredness untouched. An open pedagogical articulation would have destroyed it.

To this we must add the commercial optic. What the Academy lost in 2000–2015 was not only the pedagogical function in isolation; it was a functioning corporate cycle of symbolic certification. The Grammy stamp no longer automatically drove sales at the previous scale, because the physical-record sales model was contracting and the streaming economy pays differently (per-stream payouts, algorithmic distribution, the platforms' own curated playlists). This is a concrete economic reality for the labels: the return on advertising investment in Grammy certification was declining. The labels standing behind the Academy's Board were getting less and less commercial benefit from the institution in its old form. Internal pressure for reform arose not from some abstract "cultural mission," but from an economic one: the certification cycle has to be reassembled for the new media environment, otherwise the institution ceases to be useful to its founders. That determines which reform Mason chose. Not pedagogical modernization, not a return to an aesthetic criterion, but a rebuilding of the certification language.

Mason's filter reads, in this optic, directly. His production profile maps a concrete market segment of the 2020s labels: mainstream R&B, pop with a massive fan base, hip-hop in blend with pop, African American artists with multi-platform distribution, film and television soundtracks as a channel of additional revenue. This is the segment in which Universal, Sony, and Warner (the heirs of the five 1957 labels) need to drive sales in the new media environment. Mason at the head of the Academy in 2020 means that the new certification cycle is being built around this segment. The DEI language (representation, diversity, historic recognition) functions as the new advertising label for the segment: "first X-genre artist to win Y," "historic recognition of Z community," "representation milestone for W demographic." The labels perform the same function Grammy stamps performed in the old model: they raise sales, extend the catalog life of an album, keep the artist on the books as a label asset. What changed was the language of certification, not its function.

Over seventeen months of concentrated authority, Mason and the Board made three key decisions, examined in detail in the Gramscian report: creation of the Chief DEI Officer position (May 2020), dissolution of the Nominations Review Committees (April 2021), targeted recruitment of new membership (2021–2022) [a]. In the Alexandrian frame, these three decisions together do not constitute an attempt to fill the sacred signifier with new content, but a language in which the Academy formalized its public abdication of responsibility for the prior pedagogical function. In the commercial optic, the same three decisions constitute a retooling of the certification cycle: Chief DEI Officer as the administrator of a new advertising language; dissolution of the committees as the removal of procedural resistance to that retooling; new membership as an electorate that votes within the new language. A detailed analysis of the language follows in the next section. What is important to fix here is this: the pedagogical and commercial analyses do not contradict one another; they describe a single reform in two registers.

The second audience: Weeknd and the symbolic break of 2020

On November 24, 2020, the Academy announced the nominations for the 2021 Grammys. The Weeknd was not among them, even though "Blinding Lights" was the most-streamed single of the year and a Billboard Hot 100 record-holder [a][4]. Publicly, The Weeknd called the Academy "corrupt" and announced a boycott.

For Grammy's double ritual, the Weeknd episode meant structurally more than one artist boycotting. The question was not whether "Blinding Lights" deserved a nomination (reasonable people can disagree). The question was something else: the Academy in 2020, at the height of implementing its reform, was unable to nominate a Black R&B artist with the track that had been unambiguously the main commercial event of the musical year. The synchrony between peer consensus and popular recognition, which had held Grammy's two rituals together for seventy years, was not merely disturbed. It was disturbed in precisely the direction the Academy had publicly declared its own priority.

In Cultural DiamondFour poles of a cultural object: creator, object, receiver, social world (Griswold) terms, the break occurred simultaneously along two axes. Receiver ↔ Object: the audience did not find, among the laureates, what it considered to be the main musical event of the year. Creator ↔ Social World: the Academy, declaring inclusion, could not include the most commercially successful Black artist of the year. Together the two breaks amounted to something larger than their sum. They were evidence that an institution declaring new content for its sacred (inclusion) was unable to produce that content through its own procedure.

The Gramscian report captures the episode in a structural observation: "For an organization with a genuine peer-review criterion, the boycott of a single artist is not a crisis: the plane flies or it crashes regardless of whether one specific passenger recognizes the pilot's qualification. But the Recording Academy reacted precisely as a political organization with crowd-review logic" [a]. The Alexandrian formulation of the same moment runs as follows. Before 2020 Grammy did not respond to boycotts, because the peer-consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) ritual by definition does not depend on whether each individual participant acknowledges it. After 2020 Grammy reacts to every public refusal, because the internal ritual no longer holds up on its own logic, and the institution is seeking legitimacy through the trust of the external audience.

That is the moment at which Grammy's double ritual reorganizes internally. Before 2018, the external ceremonial ritual derived its legitimacy from the internal peer ritual: Grammy was regarded as the main musical event because colleagues had chosen the main work. After 2020 the dependency inverts. The internal peer ritual now needs confirmation from the external audience in order to keep its legitimacy: if The Weeknd publicly calls the system "corrupt," and if BMAC issues grades of B to B+ year after year [a], the Academy is compelled to respond. An institution built as a closed peer community begins to function as a publicly accountable organization, because the community itself has stopped confirming its legitimacy from inside.

IV. The language of public abdication of pedagogical responsibility: reform 2020–2022

The new frame as a language of abdication

Under Mason's interim leadership in 2020–2021, the Academy assembled a new public frame for its own mission, stated consistently in press releases, in the CEO's interviews, and in the documents of the Tchen Task Force. The frame covered the three standard dimensions (Snow & Benford: diagnosis of the problem, solution, motivation to act now). The diagnosis was formulated as the structural underrepresentation of women and POC in the membership and among the laureates. The stock phrase "historic underrepresentation" recurred in press releases in 2020–2022 and in Mason's interviews [a]. The solution came through three institutional steps, examined in detail in the Gramscian report: introduction of the DEI function (May 2020), dissolution of the Nominations Review Committees (April 2021), targeted recruitment of new membership with demographic quotas (2021–2022) [a]. The motivation rested on a convergence of moral and market logics particular to 2020. Moral: the Academy had to meet the values of the post-BLM, post-MeToo era. Market: the dominance of R&B and hip-hop in streaming [a] required institutional representation.

The frame is internally consistent. But its function is not what it presents itself as. The frame does not address the task of filling the empty sacred center with new content. It performs a different function: it gives the Academy a language in which it can publicly abdicate its prior pedagogical role without calling the abdication an abdication. Representation is not a new criterion of excellence but a language in which the question of a criterion is no longer asked. "We do not know what excellence is in substantive terms, but we know that those who have been historically excluded must be included." This is not a formula for defining the sacred; it is a formula for abandoning the position from which the institution could define the sacred. The Academy says not "here is what good music is," but "we are no longer the institution that answers that question."

In this light the three institutional steps of 2020–2022 acquire their precise meaning. The DEI function is not an attempt to renew the peer mandate through a new group of experts but a delegation of the question of a criterion to an external (demographic) arbiter. The dissolution of the Nominations Review Committees is not a procedural reform but the elimination of the last instrument for maintaining the peer habitus. The targeted recruitment of new membership is not a renewal of the electorate but its expansion along a principle unrelated to peer competence. Each step taken separately can be read as a technical reform, and this is what is done in the Academy's public communication. Taken together, they form a coherent procedure of public abdication of responsibility for the pedagogical function.

A detailed analysis of this language proceeds through two narrative optics. The first optic, the four axes of Alexander–Smith, describes Grammy's internal narrative about itself. What Grammy tells about itself after 2018: how it defines the "we," in what time it is moving, where it draws the moral line, what it places at the center of attention. This is a cross-section on the content of the institution's own voice. The second optic, Somers's four levels, describes how this internal narrative relates to narratives at other levels: to Grammy's public image in the mass audience, to the academic narrative in musicological criticism, to the broad historical-philosophical frames into which Grammy has been inscribed from outside. This is a cross-section on the position of the institution's narrative among other narratives about it.

First optic: four axes of Grammy's internal narrative

What the Recording Academy tells about itself after 2018. The institution's narrative is organized around four axes. Each axis gives an answer to a concrete question of self-identification.

Identity ("who we are"). Before 2018, "we" meant a closed peer community replenished by invitation, with a boundary drawn along a professional line. After 2018 the reform redefined "we" through demographic representation. The first identity was pedagogical: "we are those who teach how to discern." The second is not pedagogical: "we are those who mirror the composition." In its self-identification the Academy ceased to be an institution-teacher.

Time ("where we are going"). Before 2018 the historical narrative was invisible. The reform introduced an explicit narrative of progress: the past was flawed, the present is better, the institution is correcting historical injustices. The proxy metric of representation contains no criterion of completion. By 2024–2026 the temporal narrative begins to turn into a narrative of stagnation: representation has been achieved, the next step is unclear.

Good and evil ("where our moral line runs"). Before 2018 the moral line was procedural: what counted as a violation was an attribution fraud (Milli Vanilli 1990). After 2018 violations came to be seen as outcomes reflecting insufficient diversity. Within its own narrative the Academy holds two contradictory grounds of legitimacy: procedural legitimacy (competent colleagues did the voting) and demographic legitimacy (the electorate is representative). If the procedure is sufficient, diversity is unnecessary. If diversity is necessary, the procedure is incomplete.

Scale ("what we say loudly and what we keep silent about"). Loudly, the institution speaks of representation, the expansion of categories, international expansion, demographic shifts in the membership. Quietly, or not at all, it speaks of a criterion for "good music," of any substantive definition of excellence. The distribution of loudness mirrors what the Academy has surrendered: the pedagogical stays silent, the non-pedagogical has become the only loud voice.

Taken together, the four axes yield a portrait. Identity has been redefined through demography. Time is moving in a narrative of progress without any criterion of completion. The moral line holds two incompatible grounds of legitimacy. Loudness is distributed such that pedagogical content is absent from the institution's voice. On all four dimensions the Academy tells about itself as something other than an institution-teacher.

Second optic: Somers's four levels, and the relation of the internal narrative to the others

The first optic has shown what the Academy is saying about itself. The second optic shows how this internal voice relates to other narratives about Grammy, produced not by the Academy. The same institution is described at four scales: its own self-description, mass public representation, academic critical literature, the large historical-philosophical frames. In a stable state the four levels are aligned: the institution says about itself roughly what others say about it, and these four descriptions are compatible. After 2018 the four levels began to diverge.

Ontological level (what the institution says). The Academy's internal self-describing narrative held steady for seventy years: "We are a professional community that rewards the excellence of our colleagues." The ontological narrative was maintained through closed membership, the invitation procedure, corporate memory, and the succession of iconic laureates (Fitzgerald, Wonder, Jackson). After 2018 the internal narrative was restructured. Tchen Task Force, DEI function, requalification of 90% of the membership, targeted recruitment of 3,900 new members in 2024. The Academy redefined who it is, from within. By 2022 the ontological narrative had taken shape as "We are the institution responsible for representing the music community in its diversity." This is the content the first optic described through four axes.

Public level (what the mass audience says about Grammy). The narrative of Grammy in broad public consciousness changes significantly more slowly than the internal one. For the CBS-viewing mass audience of 2018–2020, Grammy remained "the main musical ceremony of the year." Viewers came into contact with an already-changed internal narrative of the Academy while carrying their old expectation. The gap between the ontological and the public levels showed up as a sense that "something is off." The audience recognized the old name but saw a different event. The ratings fall of 2018–2021 is not merely a reaction to scandals; it is the quantitative symptom of the two levels now producing incompatible descriptions of the same institution. Some viewers accepted the new ontological narrative and fit into the Academy's new public image. Others rejected it and walked away from the broadcast. By 2026 the public level is split: part of the mass audience holds onto the old image, part has accepted the new one, a common narrative is no longer there.

Conceptual level (what the academic and critical literature says). Grammy's narrative in musicological and critical literature was always ambivalent. Grammy had traditionally been criticized for inertia, for being out of date, for the conservative preferences of an aging peer electorate. A significant share of the conceptual narrative welcomed the 2020–2022 reform as an overdue correction. At the same time another share of that same narrative (academic critics, historians of American music) registers the loss of what the reform removed: the expert filter that had secured the historical coherence of peer consensus. The conceptual level split into two incompatible descriptions of the same reform. The Academy cannot lean on a consistent academic narrative, because no such thing exists anymore: one half of the conceptual level supports its current ontological narrative, the other half puts it in question.

Metanarrative (the large historical-philosophical frames). At the broad historical-philosophical level, Grammy after 2018 turned out to be a point of intersection of two competing large narratives. A progressivist frame: more and more groups sequentially receive public recognition that had previously been limited to a narrower circle. First white men were included as full participants, then all men, then women, then racial minorities. The Academy's reform reads as one more step in this expansion. A conservative frame: expert communities and their tacit criteria of quality are being destroyed in many places at once (universities, medical academies, music schools), and Grammy is one such case. Both metanarratives pick up real aspects of what is happening, and both use Grammy as an argument for larger claims. The Academy has become the object of two opposed interpretations, neither of which coincides with its own ontological narrative. The progressivist frame speaks of Grammy as a hero of a process; the conservative frame speaks of Grammy as its victim. The Academy itself tells its story differently: as an institution that is correcting its own history.

The divergence of the levels as diagnosis. If we bring the four levels together into a single picture, the result is this. The ontological level has been restructured (the Academy defines itself through representation). The public level is split (part of the audience has accepted the new image, part clings to the old one). The conceptual level is divided into two incompatible descriptions of the reform. The metanarrative level has made the Academy the object of two opposed interpretations, neither of which matches its own. The coherence between the four levels, which had been settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) before 2018, has fallen apart. Each level now lives its own life. The Academy's internal narrative is produced by its corporate communication (press releases, CEO interviews, Task Force reports), but this communication does not determine how the Academy is heard at the other levels. The institution speaks, but no longer is heard as it speaks. That is the second type of institutional crisis, additional to a content crisis of the code: a crisis of coherence between levels of discourse about the institution.

This makes it possible to specify what was destroyed after 2018. What was destroyed was not the content of the code (that was never formulated, as section VI shows). What was destroyed was not a single specific decision (all three decisions of the reform continue to work operationally). What was destroyed was the hierarchical coherence among the four narrative levels, which for seventy years had allowed the Academy to be at once self-for-itself, self-for-the-audience, self-for-the-critics, and part of a large American cultural history. Each level now produces its own version of Grammy, and these versions do not align. That is why no reform, however operationally successful, produces a re-fusion: re-fusion requires coherence among the levels, not changes within one of them.

Representation as a language of abdication

Representation is not a new sacred code and not a filling of the empty center with new content. It is the language in which the Academy formalized the public abdication of its pedagogical role. The language was not chosen at random. It has two properties that make it the only usable instrument for an institution in the position of Grammy 2020.

First: representation is measurable. "Our membership is X% POC and Y% women" is a verifiable claim. A target ("+2,500 women voting members by 2025" [a]) can be set and its fulfillment can be reported. Progress can be assessed externally (the BMAC Music Industry Action Report Card annually, grades of B to B+ [a]). An institution that publicly abdicates responsibility for a pedagogical function must demonstrate that it is occupied with something in its place. If the language of abdication had been aesthetic ("we no longer know what excellence is"), public communication of the institution would have become impossible. A demographic metric gives the Academy a language in which it can say a great deal without saying anything about the sacred center.

Second: representation shifts the question of a criterion away from the institution and onto a demographic arbiter. The Academy no longer says "here is what good music is." The Academy says "here is what our membership looks like." The question of good music is delegated: formally to the voting procedure, in fact to those demographic groups whose representation has been secured in the new electorate. The Academy takes off itself the mandate of defining excellence. A substantive formulation of an aesthetic criterion, which the Academy could have adopted as the alternative, would have been contestable by definition: representatives of different genres, generations, and professional roles would not have agreed among themselves. Representation solves that problem not through formulation but through its absence: it claims to be the moral ground for the institution's existence without an aesthetic criterion.

After 2021 the Recording Academy declares that it judges music. In practice it reports on the diversity of those who judge. The Academy balances between two lines of defense: when the composition of the laureates is criticized, it appeals to procedural legitimacy (competent colleagues did the voting); when the procedure is criticized, it appeals to the diversity of the voters. The combined position is contradictory: if the procedure is sufficient, diversity adds no legitimacy; if diversity is necessary, the prior procedure was not legitimate, which puts seventy years of the institution's history under doubt. This is the substitution at the heart of the language of abdication: the institution speaks without speaking about what its mandate used to speak of.

Diagnosis of the reform through fictitious representation

The mechanism described above can be reformulated more precisely through the concept of fictitious representation, introduced in the methodology. The term is descriptive, not rhetorical: every use requires a concrete indication of where the fictitiousness lies. The 2020–2022 reform produced fictitious representation along three concrete dimensions. Each is testable and each is confirmed by the evidence.

Fictitiousness by criterion for the selection of representatives. Before the reform, the Academy's peer representation rested on a dual procedure: demographic and professional characteristics of a new member were checked in parallel, and the Member Review Committees verified professional status independently of other criteria. The April 30, 2021 reform dissolved the Nominations Review Committees, and the parallel verification of professional competence weakened alongside it. The targeted recruitment of new membership in 2021–2022 (3,900 new members in 2024, 57% POC, 45% women, 47% under 40 [a]) used demographic categories as a constitutive criterion of selection, not as one condition alongside competence. The result: the procedure kept the "peer" label but ceased to certify that a new member is in fact a peer in the professional sense. The Academy's electorate now includes voters whose professional status in the field they judge has not passed institutional verification in the form in which such verification had existed until 2021.

Fictitiousness by the substance of the judgment. Before the reform, peer representation assumed that the institution reproduces the judgment of its representatives as a substantive statement about the work. Pre-2018 press releases contained discussion of the laureates' musical choices, laureate biographies included craft characterizations, the trade press parsed the outcomes of the ceremony in an aesthetic register. After 2021 this reproducing mechanism ceased to work. The Academy's press releases focus on the diversity of the membership, on procedural reforms, on partnerships. CEO Mason's speeches are organized around "inclusion," "representation," "diversity," without substantive discussion of the laureates' music. Mason's biography on the Academy website describes his achievements through procedural changes, not through aesthetic formulations. The trade press of 2022–2026 analyzes the ceremonies in a political or demographic register; aesthetic analysis has disappeared as the dominant frame (this is systematically checked in the three tests of section VI). Representatives continue to vote, the institution records the outcome as a formal procedure, but does not reproduce the vote as a substantive expert statement about the music. The output is procedure without representative content.

Fictitiousness in relation to the represented. Before the reform, peer representation had a defined addressee of representation: internally, the recording industry was represented as a professional community; externally, the mass audience was represented as the pupil of a pedagogical function. Both addresses were structurally linked and were working through the taste-shaping infrastructure. The reform expanded membership along demographic criteria but did not state whose representation this is in the new configuration. The Academy uses the formula "representation of the music community in its diversity" [a], which admits four different interpretations of the community's boundaries. It may mean: representation of all US music-industry professionals; representation of all active music professionals worldwide; representation of demographic groups in proportions matching their share of the population; representation of demographics in their share of the listening audience on streaming platforms. Each interpretation yields a different represented community, with different boundaries, different sizes, and different criteria of belonging. The institution does not indicate which interpretation is correct. That is the third dimension of fictitiousness as applied to the Academy's specific case: the community on whose behalf the institution speaks is not defined even at the level of basic boundaries, which makes the very assertion of representation empty of content.

The three dimensions together give concrete content to the thesis of fictitious representation. The 2020–2022 reform is fictitious by selection criterion (professional competence is not verified in parallel with demography), by substance of judgment (the institution does not reproduce the judgment as a substantive statement), and in relation to the represented (it is not defined whom the new composition represents). These are three testable characteristics of the institution's state, not an abstract evaluation. If even one of the three dimensions were different (for example, if the Academy restored parallel verification of professional competence, or began publicly formulating aesthetic judgments, or defined the boundaries of the represented community), the diagnosis of fictitiousness would require revision. None of the three dimensions changed over the 2022–2026 period covered by this report.

Within this frame, the thesis of public abdication of responsibility for the pedagogical function acquires empirical content. Abdication is not a declaration and not a rhetorical gesture. It is a concrete institutional transformation across three dimensions of representation. The form of representation has been preserved: the Academy still calls itself an academy, peer voting still takes place, results are published. The content of representation has been changed: the criterion for selecting representatives, the substance of their judgment, the specification of the addressee. All three structural elements have been replaced.

Fictitious representation as a working certification cycle. Add the commercial optic. The three dimensions of fictitiousness can be considered not only as the loss of content in peer representation, but as a retooling of the corporate certification cycle to a new advertising language. In this optic the reform is not merely losing the content of the former function; it is actively producing a new one, only not pedagogical but certificatory.

First dimension: the weakening of professional-competence verification alongside demographically expanded membership is not only the loss of peer verification. It is at the same time the creation of a new electorate that votes within a new advertising language. The labels gain a voter base more likely to produce certifications in categories that the labels are promoting in the current media environment (multi-platform R&B/hip-hop artists, cross-genre collaborations, artists with a strong social-media fan base). The new membership is not just a demographically balanced electorate; it is an electorate tuned to certify a specific market segment.

Second dimension: the absence of substantive reproduction of the judgment in public communication is not only the loss of an aesthetic register. It is at the same time a shift to a new advertising register. Press releases focused on membership diversity, CEO speeches about inclusion, trade press in a demographic register — all of this works as the advertising shell of certification. The Grammy stamp stops carrying the message "this album is aesthetically better than others" and starts carrying the message "this album represents an important group story (first Black woman in the category, first Spanish-language album, first streaming artist)." This is a new advertising label selling in a different language but performing the same certification function.

Third dimension: the indefiniteness of the represented community is not only the loss of a referent. It is at the same time an expansion of the market reach of certification. When the Academy speaks on behalf of "the music community in its diversity," any demographically charged winner can be presented as "a representative of the community," and the label is free to build an advertising campaign targeting a specific demographic group. The indefiniteness of the referent is not a bug but a function: it allows the certification mark to be flexibly attached to different product groups and different advertising segments.

Considered together, the three dimensions show: the Academy has not simply lost its old certification cycle; it has built a new one. The new cycle runs by different rules than the 1957–2000 cycle. The old cycle certified aesthetic status ("this album is the best"); the new one certifies representational status ("this album represents a group"). The old cycle rested on the monopoly of taste-shaping instruments; the new cycle is built into the streaming-platform economy. The old cycle worked through a single mass broadcast; the new one is fragmented across different demographic segments. The structural function is the same: certification of label products to raise their value. The advertising language is different.

This also gives an empirically testable version of the fictitious-representation thesis. Fictitiousness does not mean the institution has stopped working. The institution is working, just as a new certification cycle rather than as the prior peer-representative one. The distinction matters because it determines which critical frames apply. Criticism of the Academy from an aesthetic position ("they no longer judge music as better or worse") misses: they are under no obligation to do that in their new function. Criticism from a representational position ("their representation is incomplete and indefinite") misses analogously: full representation is not part of their new function. The only critical frame that lands: naming the institution by what it now does, that is, a certification mechanism for the advertising shell of the modern music business. This is precisely what the Academy cannot do publicly on its own account, for the same reason of constitutive undeclarability that has been at work since 1957.

Cultural trauma claimAppropriation of someone else's real pain as a source of one's own moral authority (Alexander & Eyerman): an extended application

A conceptual caveat is required here, analogous to the one made in the Iowa MFA report. In Alexander and Eyerman's strict formulation, a cultural trauma claimAppropriation of someone else's real pain as a source of one's own moral authority (Alexander & Eyerman) presupposes a real collective traumatic event (slavery, the Holocaust, genocide), whose significance is constructed through a narrative of suffering. To apply the concept correctly to the Recording Academy of 2020–2022, it must be extended.

The Academy did not appropriate trauma directly. It worked through a more complex mechanism: it used an already-mobilized traumatic narrative (racial violence, the murder of George Floyd, the BLM mobilization) as context for reformulating its own legitimacy. The Academy did not create a claim about trauma; it attached itself to a claim already made by the movement: $1 million donation to Color of Change in June 2020, partnership with the Black Music Action Coalition, launch of the Black Music Collective in September 2020 [a]. Each of these acts was a gesture of joining an existing moral collective. The Academy received legitimation through its entry, not through a claim of its own.

Extending the concept is justified here, but it remains an extension. In terminologically strict use, the 2020 episode belongs to a related category that might provisionally be called associated trauma positioning: an institution positions itself next to a traumatic narrative without making its own claim to it. This report retains the extended term cultural trauma claimAppropriation of someone else's real pain as a source of one's own moral authority (Alexander & Eyerman) for comparability with the rest of the series (Ford Foundation, NEA), and flags the extension explicitly.

The difference from Ford is substantial. Walker constructed an institutional narrative of racial injustice as the central problem of American democracy, and Ford became the subject speaking that narrative. The Academy did not construct a narrative; it joined one. Operationally this is cheaper (no manifesto has to be written, a donation suffices) and reputationally less risky (you are not the author of the narrative). But it is also less stable. Once the BLM moral collective loses its centrality in 2022–2024, the Academy is left with an infrastructure of partnerships built for a specific historical configuration that has now shifted.

Why re-fusion is unlikely

Re-fusion in the Alexandrian frame means the restoration of performance: the audience believes again. The Academy's 2020–2022 attempt produced the appearance of re-fusion in one local sense (the 2024 broadcast grew to 17.09 million viewers, +37.8% [a]), but it did not produce re-fusion in a structural sense. The report's hypothesis: over a five-to-ten-year horizon, re-fusion is unlikely. Three reasons for this hypothesis follow.

First reason: the new audience is not the old audience. The 2024 ratings rise was tied to the presence, among the nominees, of Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and SZA — three artists with massive fandoms and high readiness to mobilize around the ceremony. This was a specific audience drawn by specific artists, not a restored mass audience of Grammy as a ritual. In 2025 and 2026, when Swift was not in the main categories, the ratings fell again: 15.4 million and 14.4 million respectively [9]. The synchrony between peer consensus and popular recognition was not restored; individual artists in individual years simply created local peaks of attention. Local attention peaks cannot return the institution to a pedagogical position it has already publicly surrendered.

Second reason: the internal peer ritual has not been restored. The dissolution of the Nominations Review Committees was presented as a "win for transparency" [a], but structurally it was the dismantling of the last institutional instrument for maintaining the peer habitus. The new direct vote of 13,000+ members, among whom a significant share are "new" (joined after 2021), does not reproduce the same professional network. Peer consensus as a sociological fact is no longer produced by the current procedure. The Academy defends its results by appealing to the democratic character of the procedure, not to the expertise of the voters. This is an important shift: an institution that previously defended its choices through the competence of its judges now defends them through the procedural form. Democratic process without expertise is not peer consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) but crowd review, as described in the Gramscian report.

Third reason: the conditions for restoring a pedagogical position after a public abdication of it are not observable on the current horizon. A teacher who has publicly admitted that his prior system of evaluation was unjust cannot the next year say "forget it, I know again what's better." The same teacher also cannot say "I was biased," or "my experts' vote required demographic correction," and then lay claim to his prior authority. Neither the mass audience nor the peer community will accept this, because everyone has witnessed the public act of disavowal. A pedagogical position rests on the internal conviction of those who hold it and on the public legitimacy of their right to judge. The Academy itself publicly disavowed both through the Tchen Task Force, the DEI language, the dissolution of the committees, the demographic quotas. Restoring the position would require that all these public acts of disavowal be simultaneously cancelled, which would produce a new public scandal larger than the one these acts were meant to resolve in the first place. Theoretically, restoration is possible through a generational change of leadership and a reformulation of the Academy's function by a new leadership that did not participate in the acts of 2018–2022. This requires decades and new external conditions that would make a pedagogical position publicly desirable. Not one of these conditions is in view on any observable horizon.

The album that won Album of the Year in 2026 (Bad Bunny, "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS") can be described through representation (the first Spanish-language album in the history of the category [9]), but cannot be described through an excellence criterion formulated by the Academy. The Academy has not formulated such a criterion and cannot formulate one in its current position. When in 2026 Billie Eilish steps on stage with the speech "Fuck ICE is all I want to say" [9] and receives Song of the Year, the Academy receives a political event. As for what, exactly, in "Wildflower" makes it song of the year from the institution's standpoint, the institution gives no answer. The answer is given by the political context, not by any institutional criterion. A systematic check of this picture across three types of sources is provided in section VI.

Evidence of instability: Trevor Noah leaves

Another piece of evidence of the new frame's instability arrived in 2026. Trevor Noah had hosted the ceremony since 2021. His style was emphatically apolitical: in its 2026 review Variety described him as "doing the inoffensive opposite of his Daily Show persona" and "celebrating who was in the room, with no edge to any of the recognitions" [7]. After six years as host, Noah announced in 2026 that this was his last ceremony. The official reason given was the natural end of a long-standing agreement [7].

The structural significance of the episode matters. Noah had been chosen by the Academy for the host role precisely because his reputational profile (a Black South African, a satirist of political news, a liberal audience) secured visual and narrative coherence with the Academy's new frame. Over five years Noah had performed a function the Academy itself could not: he was living evidence that Grammy belonged to the new era. Noah's departure coincided with the broadcast contract shifting from CBS to ABC/Disney and with the continued decline in ratings. The structural consequences of both transitions are developed in section VII.

V. The double ritual and its pedagogical support

Two rituals, one mechanism

In many cultural institutions the sacred is produced by a single ritual addressed to a single audience. Disney produces the sacred through the release of a film, addressed to the mass audience. The Ford Foundation produces the sacred through a grant, addressed to a professional community. The NEA produces the sacred through a federal grant, addressed both to professionals and (indirectly, through the grant) to the very fact of federal recognition. AMPAS is closest to Grammy (a double ritual: the vote and the broadcast), but its two levels are tightly coupled and rarely fall out of sync (a detailed comparison below). Grammy formally enacts two rituals.

Internal ritual: peer consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu). A closed vote by Academy members. 13,000+ members by 2024, about 8,000 in the 1990s, about 2,000 in 1959 [a]. The sacred object of this ritual: the statuette as a sign of collegial recognition. The ritual's audience coincides with its performers. Those who vote and those for whom the vote is significant are the same people.

External ritual: ceremonial broadcast. The open televised broadcast of the ceremony, aired on CBS since 1973 and moving to ABC/Disney from 2027 [10]. The sacred object is the same, but inscribed in a different narrative. The sign that a given album or artist has been recognized as the main musical event of the year. The audience for this ritual held within the range of 15–26 million viewers at the peak of the 2010s, and stabilized at 14–15 million in 2025–2026 [a][9][10]. This is a mass ceremonial ritual in the classical Alexandrian sense.

An important structural correction to how the two rituals look from outside. They were not two autonomous rituals with their own logics, as is sometimes implied. They were two phases of a single taste-shaping mechanism described in section I as the pedagogical mandate. Peer voting produced a peer decision. The taste-shaping instruments (radio, television, criticism, label catalogs) turned the peer decision into a mass public visibility. The ceremonial broadcast was part of these instruments: an annual taste-shaping summit at which the peer selection was shown to the mass audience in prime time. The two rituals were parts of a single system: the peer community shaped taste, the taste-shaping infrastructure broadcast it, the mass audience learned to discern what was important by the peer benchmark.

Seventy years of synchrony: explanation through the pedagogical mandate

Why did the two rituals coincide for seventy years? The symmetrical answer ("peer selection and mass taste happened to coincide") does not hold over seventy years; that is too long to be chance. The asymmetric answer is more precise: the peer community did not coincide with the mass audience, it shaped it. Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen were not simultaneously the peer choice and the mass choice by accident. They were the product of the pedagogical mandate. The industry's peer community canonized them; the taste-shaping instruments (radio rotation, MTV, the Billboard charts, Rolling Stone criticism, the CBS broadcast) turned that canonization into a mass habit; the mass audience learned, on the basis of that habit, what to count as good music.

When in 2000–2015 the taste-shaping instruments were fragmented by digital platforms (Napster, iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, TikTok), the pedagogical mandate lost the infrastructure through which it had been acting. Hip-hop and R&B became the dominant genres by volume of listening (RIAA: steady first place since 2017 [a]) not because the Academy's peer community canonized them, but because algorithmic platforms promoted them independently of any peer decision. The Academy's peer electorate remained shaped by the pop and rock of the 1980s and 1990s, but its habitus was no longer being relayed to the mass audience, because the instruments of relay had passed into other hands.

The 2014 event (Macklemore vs. Kendrick Lamar in the hip-hop categories) was a publicly discussed instance of this divergence. The Academy's peer electorate preferred a white rapper from Seattle to a Black rapper from Compton in a category where the latter was an indisputable critical force. Macklemore himself publicly apologized to Lamar after the ceremony for winning. This was not just a failure of peer judgment. It was visible evidence that the Academy's peer community was sociologically out of date relative to the genre in which the mass audience already lived, and that the Academy no longer had its own instruments for bringing that audience back into its taste. The 1989 and 1995 committees worked as an internal filter for peer coherence, but they could not restore the lost pedagogical mandate, because the mandate rested on external infrastructure, not on internal procedure.

The divergence of the two rituals as symptom, not cause

In 2018–2021 Grammy's two rituals publicly diverged. The peer ritual lost part of its audience in February 2018 in the Portnow episode (the first fracture, section II). The ceremonial ritual lost part of its audience in November 2020 in the Weeknd episode (analyzed in section III). It is important to read the relation between these two events and the institution's pedagogical function correctly.

The divergence of the two rituals is not an independent cause of the Academy's crisis. It is the symptom that the pedagogical mandate had already stopped working before the events of 2018 and 2020 publicly exposed it. Had the pedagogical mandate still been in place, the two rituals would have continued to be enacted in sync, because the taste-shaping instruments would have been turning peer selections into mass habit independently of which genres happened to dominate the current streaming environment. But by the end of the 2010s the taste-shaping instruments had already been distributed among Spotify, TikTok, Pitchfork, social media, Anthony Fantano, and other agents, many of them not dependent on the Academy. The divergence of 2018 and 2020 made visible a structural change that had occurred in 2000–2015.

First divergence: peer ritual, February 2018. A break between the institution and part of the peer community (women executives demanding Portnow's resignation). A break along the Creator ↔ Receiver axis inside the peer ritual. Part of the receivers of the ritual refused to accept it as a legitimate peer consensus. It was not a mass departure, but it was structurally central. The very category of the peer community whose loyalty had been central to the internal ritual's working was the first to move away.

Second divergence: ceremonial ritual, November 2020. A break along the Receiver ↔ Object axis inside the ceremonial ritual, through The Weeknd episode (analyzed in section III). The ratings fall from 18.7 million (2020) to 8.8 million (2021), −53% [a], recorded this break as a quantitative phenomenon. Half of the mass audience left in a single year.

The asynchrony of these two events matters in its own structural logic. It means that any response by the Academy to one of them has effects on the other, often contrary to intent. A reform conceived to restore the peer ritual (the DEI reform of membership, launched in the wake of the first event) produced the second divergence through the Weeknd episode: the new membership voted by new reflexes that did not match those of the mass audience. A reform conceived to restore the ceremonial ritual (the attempt to draw the mass audience through nominations for Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, SZA, Bad Bunny) draws criticism inside the peer community as a subordination of peer judgment to commercial success and political agenda.

Why a single reform is impossible

From the divergence of the two rituals follows the impossibility of a single reform that would simultaneously restore both. The reason is logical. The peer ritual requires the vote to be convincing to the peer community, that is, to follow peer logic: a professional consensus potentially divergent from mass taste. The ceremonial ritual requires the televised result to be convincing to the mass audience, that is, to synchronize with mass taste. The two requirements are opposed, and the opposition cannot be reconciled through procedural reform.

Before 2018 the opposition was not visible, because the pedagogical mandate held the two rituals in coherence. The peer community set the taste, the mass audience learned from it, and the divergence between them did not become a public problem. After 2018 the pedagogical mandate no longer works, and the opposition has become visible and irreconcilable. Any decision by the Academy now must choose between the two rituals. The 2021 dissolution of the committees was a choice in favor of the ceremonial ritual (expansion of the electorate, movement toward mass logic) at the expense of the peer ritual (dismantling of the infrastructure that had ensured professional consensus). Subsequent decisions will be of the same kind: each one for one ritual against the other.

This is the structural trap Grammy has been in since 2018. Section VI will develop why this trap has no internal exit, even under the most competent leadership. The problem is not Mason and not the Board; it is that the pedagogical mandate that held the rituals together was lost in the two-phase process described in section III.

Structural comparison with AMPAS

Among other institutions, AMPAS is closest to Grammy in ritual structure: academy members vote, the ceremony shows their selection. But at AMPAS the two audiences remain tightly coupled by a shared common infrastructure: the craft-branch membership (actors, directors, producers, cinematographers, editors) produces the selection, and the mass audience accepts it through the reflex of "the best film of the year." AMPAS's two rituals operate in one cultural field (film), where the peer community (Hollywood) and the mass audience (moviegoers) share a long history of mutual recognition. The Oscar differs from Grammy in that the gap between the peer choice and mass taste is rare and always local (one film in one year).

Grammy differs in that the musical field by the 2010s had fragmented more deeply than the film field. The streaming audience for hip-hop and R&B in the US lives in TikTok and Spotify playlists, while the Academy's peer community up to 2021 lived in Los Angeles and New York among producers of the 1980s–1990s era. The gap between the two audiences became not local (one case a year) but structural (one community against another).

Both organizations adopted DEI reforms in response to this structural break that look similar on the surface: recruitment of new membership to expand diversity, new selection criteria. But the function of the reform differs at AMPAS and at Grammy. At AMPAS the reform plays out an already-existing tradition: the Academy periodically renews its membership to remain relevant to the film industry, and 2020 was simply a more intense wave of that renewal. At Grammy the reform has a much more radical function: it changes the fundamental principle of the peer community (a closed, invitation-only professional jury) to the principle of representation (the electorate as a representation of the music community as a whole). This is a change in the type of institution, not an update of its composition.

VI. An empirical test: a change of institutional type, not a change of code

The thesis to be tested

The thesis of section IV: the 2020–2022 reform did not produce a new sacred code; it replaced the empty sacred signifier with a proxy metric (representation) and changed the institution's type from peer review to crowd review with a DEI overlay. If the thesis is correct, the Academy's public documents, leadership speeches, and grant programs of 2021–2026 will not contain a substantive formulation of a new aesthetics. If the thesis is wrong, one will be found. Section VI carries out this check.

Conditions for falsification

The thesis would be refuted (or substantially weakened) if the evidence showed the following.

First condition. In press releases, official statements, or policy documents of the Academy in 2021–2026 a substantive formulation of an aesthetic criterion has appeared: a statement of the form "good music is X" or "excellence means Y," where X and Y contain parameters of musical craft (compositional, performative, productional, engineering) not reducible to the demographic composition of the creators. Not a single mention is required, but a consistently reproduced formulation that could function as a publicly defensible position. The presence of such a formulation would mean that the Academy has formulated a new criterion, and the thesis of abdication of responsibility for the pedagogical function would require revision.

Second condition. Big Four acceptance speeches in 2022–2026 systematically contain an extended discussion of the work in the categories of musical craft: how the song is built, what decisions were made in recording, what that work teaches in musical terms. Not isolated mentions (those exist), but a prevailing pattern comparable to what existed before 2018. Such a pattern would mean that the institution is setting the frame for an aesthetic conversation, and the laureates are fitting into it.

Third condition. The trade press (Variety, Billboard, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork) in its post-ceremony analysis of 2022–2026 systematically describes the Academy's decisions through aesthetic arguments: why this album won, in terms of musical qualities. Not as one explanation alongside a political one, but as the dominant register of analysis. Such a register would mean that the institution produces an aesthetic judgment that the professional community of critics recognizes as an aesthetic judgment proper.

None of the three conditions is satisfied automatically. Each requires empirical verification, which is carried out in the three tests below. The tests are designed so that they could show the conditions to be met, if that were the case.

Fact-check of the "historic underrepresentation" narrative

Before moving to the tests, it is necessary to check the factual basis of the Academy's 2018–2022 public narrative. The reform was justified by the thesis of the systematic historical underrepresentation of Black artists and women in the register of Big Four winners and in the key genre categories. If this thesis corresponds to reality, the reform is a belated correction of a real problem, and this report's characterization of the second phase is wrong. If the thesis does not correspond to reality, the second phase works as the construction of a false past in order to justify a present.

Black artists among the Big Four and major genre laureates before 2018. The data are drawn from the Recording Academy's official archive and confirmed by publications in Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter.

Early period (1959–1970). The first Grammy in the Best Jazz Performance Soloist category in 1959 was won by Ella Fitzgerald, and over the following years she added 12 more awards [14]. In that same era, consistent with the genre structure of the prize at the time, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong were regular winners in jazz categories. Ray Charles won in R&B and pop, Sarah Vaughan and Nina Simone in vocal jazz, Aretha Franklin in soul and R&B, Miles Davis in instrumental jazz categories [14]. Such a distribution makes the thesis of systematic neglect of Black artists in the Academy's first decade factually untenable: they won in the categories that existed at the time for their genres.

Classic peak (1970–1990). Stevie Wonder received 25 awards, including three consecutive Album of the Year wins: 1974 for "Innervisions," 1975 for "Fulfillingness' First Finale," 1977 for "Songs in the Key of Life." This was a sequence unprecedented in Big Four history up to that point [14]. Michael Jackson won Album of the Year in 1984 for "Thriller" and 8 awards in a single night, setting the record of the time [14]. Quincy Jones accumulated 28 awards over his career, which makes him one of the most-awarded artists in the institution's history [14]. Lionel Richie was a regular winner in the same period, receiving Album of the Year in 1985 for "Can't Slow Down." Whitney Houston and Prince belong to the same circle, collecting awards in the main categories throughout the decade. Tracy Chapman, Natalie Cole, and Anita Baker won in genre and main categories in parallel. Record of the Year went to Roberta Flack in 1972 and 1973 consecutively, making her the first Black woman to repeat in that category. The same category was subsequently taken by Tina Turner in 1984 and Natalie Cole in 1991.

Contemporary period (1990–2018). Lauryn Hill received Album of the Year in 1999 for "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill," making her the first female hip-hop artist to take a main category [14]. Herbie Hancock received Album of the Year in 2008 for "River: The Joni Letters," a jazz album, which in itself was an exception in a category traditionally given to pop and rock [14]. Beyoncé by 2018 had 22 Grammy awards, and by 2026 she had 35 — the outright record in the institution's history [14]. Alongside the main categories, genre awards were regularly won by Alicia Keys, John Legend, Kanye West, Jay-Z, each of them in the first circle of African American pop and hip-hop. Outkast received Album of the Year in 2004 for "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below," the first hip-hop album to take that category [14]. Mary J. Blige, Usher, and Chance the Rapper were also laureates; Chance the Rapper in 2017 became the first artist with a streaming-only album to receive Best New Artist [14].

Women among the Big Four laureates before 2018. The classic cohort formed in the 1970s around Carole King, who received Album of the Year in 1972 for "Tapestry"; Joni Mitchell with her 7 awards; Linda Ronstadt (10 awards); and Barbra Streisand (8 awards). The generation of the 1980s and 1990s yielded a shorter but dense list of main-category laureates. Tina Turner gathered 8 awards, Whitney Houston 6, Alanis Morissette received Album of the Year 1996 for "Jagged Little Pill," Celine Dion Album of the Year 1997 for "Falling into You," Lauryn Hill Album of the Year 1999. To these add Shania Twain and other regular genre-category laureates. The first decade of the 21st century opens with Norah Jones, who received Album of the Year 2003 for "Come Away with Me" and 9 awards in total, and closes with Amy Winehouse and her 5 awards in a single night in 2008. In the second decade the central positions are occupied by Taylor Swift and Adele. Swift received Album of the Year in 2010 for "Fearless" and again in 2016 for "1989," becoming the first woman with two Album of the Year wins; Adele received Album of the Year in 2012 for "21" and in 2017 for "25." Beyoncé was in parallel collecting dozens of awards in genre categories. Record of the Year for 2000–2018 went predominantly to women or to mixed acts with women in leading positions [14].

Fact-check conclusion. The Academy's public narrative of "historic underrepresentation" at the scale described is empirically unsupported. Black artists received Album of the Year in seven different years before 2018: 1974, 1975, and 1977 for Stevie Wonder, 1984 for Michael Jackson, 1985 for Lionel Richie, 1999 for Lauryn Hill, 2004 for Outkast, 2008 for Herbie Hancock. To this row add earlier awards for Ray Charles in adjacent categories. Women received Album of the Year in eleven different years before 2018. The category's laureates include Carole King (1972), Alanis Morissette (1996), Celine Dion (1997), Lauryn Hill (1999), Norah Jones (2003), Taylor Swift (2010 and 2016), Adele (2012 and 2017), plus a number of mixed ensembles with women in leading positions. In genre categories both groups are represented abundantly and continuously across the entire history of the prize. One can speak of specific episodes in which peer selection diverged from mass response (Macklemore vs. Kendrick Lamar in 2014, certain snubs of women artists in the 1980s), but not of systemic underrepresentation at the scale the 2018–2022 reform declared. The Academy publicly acknowledged an injustice that, at the scale described, did not exist, and used that constructed narrative as the basis for abdicating responsibility. That defines the character of the second phase. This is not a belated acknowledgment of real historical injustice; it is the construction of a false past in order to justify a present.

A detailed empirical summary of the full history of Big Four laureates from 1959 to 2018, broken down by racial and gender structure, is given in the Gramscian report [a]. This report uses those data as the factual basis for the structural characterization of the second phase.

Test 1: press releases and official statements

Period of public activity: 2020–2026. Mason's speeches, Academy press releases, top-management interviews, annual reports. What is sought: a substantive formulation of a new aesthetic criterion. Not a demographic target, not a procedural change, not an alignment with a moral narrative, but a statement of the form "good music is X" or "excellence means Y," where X and Y contain aesthetic — not demographic or political — parameters.

Result of the test. Such a formulation is not found in the Academy's public materials. What is found is a consistently reproduced set of formulations organized around three types of statement.

First type: statements about the diversity of the electorate. "We've made a conscious effort to reach into different genres of music to say we need more of X or Y," Mason in Rolling Stone 2023 [a]. "Diversify our membership to better reflect the richness of the music community," press releases 2021–2022 [a]. These statements speak about the composition of the voters, not about the criterion of their voting.

Second type: statements about procedural transparency. "Revised rules and processes to make the GRAMMY Awards more transparent," Mason's biography on the Academy website [12]. Statements about the dissolution of the secret committees as a "win for transparency" [a]. These statements speak about how the process is organized, not about what is counted as excellence.

Third type: statements about service to the community. "Service organization for music creators," Mason's biography [12]. "Supporting music professionals impacted by the devastating wildfires," press releases of 2025 on aid to those affected by the Los Angeles fires [13]. "Advocated effectively in Washington for relief," Mason's biography [12]. These statements turn the Academy into a service organization for the industry, not into a judging body.

None of the three types contains an aesthetic criterion. All three together describe the Academy as an organization concerned with the composition of voters, with voting procedure, and with support of the professional community. The question of what makes an album an Album of the Year laureate is not asked and not answered in this rhetoric. The test confirms the thesis: a new aesthetic formulation has not appeared.

Test 2: winners' speeches and the laureate narrative

If the Academy does not formulate a new criterion, perhaps the criterion is formulated by the laureates at the moment of receiving the prize? The winning speeches of the last five years provide direct material for the check.

Album of the Year 2022, Jon Batiste, "We Are." Batiste was born in 1986 in New Orleans, into the Batiste family — a musical dynasty that includes Lionel Batiste (Treme Brass Band), Milton Batiste (Olympia Brass Band), and Alvin Batiste, the pianist and teacher who taught the Marsalis family and Harry Connick Jr. Jon Batiste earned his B.M. and M.M. in jazz at Juilliard. From 2015 to 2022 he was bandleader and musical director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS. In 2020 he shared an Academy Award for the soundtrack to Pixar/Disney's "Soul" with Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, becoming the second Black composer after Herbie Hancock to receive an Oscar for original score [16]. Batiste's Album of the Year acceptance speech contained a key statement [17].

"I really believe this to my core, there's no best musician, best artist, best dancer, best actor, the creative arts are subjective and they reach people at a point in their lives when they need it most."

The laureate of the first post-full-DEI-reform ceremony began his acceptance speech by denying the very possibility of ranking in art. This is not a critique of the Academy; it is perhaps Batiste's sincere conviction. But structurally it is a sign that even the laureate of the main category cannot articulate why his work is better than the others. The institution handed out a prize in the "best" category; the laureate publicly rejects the language of comparison. The sacred signifier remained empty.

Album of the Year 2025, Beyoncé, "Cowboy Carter." By then Beyoncé had 32 Grammys (the 2023 record overtaking Georg Solti) and four Album of the Year nominations without a win (2010, 2015, 2017, 2023). In 2025 "Cowboy Carter" brought her the first win in that category, along with the first win by a Black singer in Best Country Album. By the end of 2025 her total stood at 35 Grammys, more than any other artist in the institution's history [16]. Her Album of the Year acceptance speech was short and focused on thanking Linda Martell: "I just feel very full and very honored. It's been many, many years. I want to dedicate this to Ms. Martell. I hope we just keep pushing forward, opening doors" [17]. At the earlier presentation of Best Country Album the same night Beyoncé said: "I think sometimes 'genre' is a code word to keep us in our place as artists. And I just want to encourage people to do what they're passionate about, and to stay persistent" [17]. Institutional sacralization of a genre crossover works through a narrative of breaking barriers, not through an aesthetic judgment of the specific album. The album matters because it crossed a categorical line, not because it does something better than others within its own content.

Album of the Year 2026, Bad Bunny, "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS." Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (1994) was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, and grew up in Almirante Sur (a district of Vega Baja). He worked as a bagger and cashier at the Econo supermarket while studying at the University of Puerto Rico (Arecibo) in audiovisual communication (planning to become a radio host). His solo debut X 100pre (2018) entered Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. YHLQMDLG (2020) became the most-streamed album on Spotify worldwide that year. "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS" (2025) is a tribute to Puerto Rico, a turn to the island's history and cultural identity under political pressure from the continental United States. In February 2026 Bad Bunny became the first headliner of a Super Bowl halftime show to perform predominantly in Spanish [16]. His Album of the Year acceptance speech was focused on Puerto Rico: "Puerto Rico, believe me when I tell you that we are much bigger than 100 by 35, and there is nothing we can't achieve" [9]. The narrative of firstness (the first Spanish-language album to win Album of the Year) became the center of all communication about the choice. What aesthetically, within the album itself, makes it better than the other nominees (including Sabrina Carpenter, Clipse, Justin Bieber) was not formulated either by the Academy or by the press. The album is better because it represents something that was not represented before.

Billie Eilish's statement on receiving Song of the Year 2026 for "Wildflower" was even more telling. By then Eilish was already the youngest winner in Grammy history of all four Big Four on a single night (2020, age 18). Song of the Year 2026 was her tenth Grammy and her third win in this category after "Bad Guy" (2020) and "What Was I Made For?" (2024), which made her and Finneas the first writers in Grammy history to take Song of the Year three times [16]. The speech was a political statement: "No one is illegal on stolen land. Fuck ICE is all I want to say" [9]. About song of the year as such, nothing is said in the speech. The Academy made its choice, and the laureate used the moment for a political message, which is her right. But structurally this is one more piece of evidence that the institution did not support its choice with its own reasoning. Why exactly "Wildflower" is song of the year, any justification remains outside the ceremony's narrative.

Four consecutive selections in the main categories exhibit the same pattern. The laureate is picked from artists with a dense biography and a serious track record: a Juilliard jazz musician and Late Show bandleader; a 35-time Grammy winner; the most-streamed artist on Spotify for the year; the youngest three-time winner of Song of the Year in history. But each selection is explained through whom the laureate represents (a jazz line after a long pause, the first Black woman in Best Country Album, the first Spanish-language Album of the Year, a third Song of the Year as a record), not through what in the work itself makes it better than the others. A substantive explanation of why this particular work is better is provided by neither the Academy nor the laureate. The sacred signifier is not filled in from either side — not by the institution, not by those the institution sanctifies. Test 2 confirms the thesis: there is no new aesthetic code.

Test 3: Grammy post-show analysis and institutional communication

If there is no substantive code in the press releases or in the winners' speeches, the last place it could be is the post-show communication of the Academy (CEO interviews in the days after the ceremony, analyses of the year in the trade press). This material is checked through publications in Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and NPR for 2022–2026, immediately after each ceremony.

The result is as follows. The discussions run in three planes, none of which is aesthetic.

First plane: demographic bookkeeping. A tally of the share of POC among nominees and winners, a tally of the gender distribution, an assessment of the representation of different genres. This is a quasi-statistical journalistic genre that has taken shape as the standard way of covering Grammy after 2021. It measures the outcome without judging quality.

Second plane: political signals. What the laureates said from the stage, to which political camp that can be assigned, how the US president responded (developed in section VII), how it affects the ceremony's reputation. This is a political journalism genre applied to a musical event.

Third plane: industrial mechanics. What was done well in the production of the ceremony, how the presentations worked, which artists were absent, who boycotted, what contracts were signed. This is trade journalism describing the ceremony as a business event.

Aesthetic discussion (why this album is better than that one; what music deserves Album of the Year; what excellence consists of in 2025) is either absent or moved off into separate "critical takes." These takes are published not as a continuation of the Grammy narrative but as an independent judgment by critics, often at odds with the Academy's selection. The Academy itself does not participate in this third kind of discussion. It does not drive an aesthetic narrative. It drives a representation narrative.

Summary of the tests

Three tests across three different source types (official institutional speech, laureate speeches, post-show trade-press discussion) give a consistent result. There is no new aesthetic formulation. There is a consistent substitution of the question "what is excellence" with the question "who is represented." This is not merely a change of code and not an attempt to fill a void. It is the precise signature of the two-phase process described in the methodology and in section III. The Academy has not formulated a new aesthetic criterion not because it lacked time or ability. The Academy cannot formulate a new criterion, because the act of formulating a criterion requires confidence in one's own pedagogical function, and that confidence was publicly disavowed through the Tchen Task Force, the DEI reform, and the dissolution of the committees. The three test observations (press-release silence, laureates' political speeches, the demographic emphasis of criticism) all record the same structural trait: the institution has abdicated responsibility for the function from which one could have spoken of excellence in a substantive sense.

An important corollary for public debate. Attempts to attack the Academy of 2022–2026 as "ideologically captured" through critiques of its aesthetic positions miss the target. The Academy has no aesthetic positions in the form of documents one could cite. There is a procedure for accounting for diversity, and there is the result of a vote by the electorate that this procedure produced. Attacking the procedure is harder than attacking an ideology. Attacking a position is pointless, because a position (in the aesthetic sense) cannot exist for an institution that has publicly abdicated responsibility for a pedagogical function.

Analogously, attempts to defend the 2022–2026 Academy through appeals to "a new aesthetic vision" ("music has finally been recognized in its fullness," "the full diversity has been represented") also miss the target, from the other side. The Academy itself does not formulate such a vision. The defenders are writing for it what it should have been saying but does not say. If the Academy really had formulated a new aesthetic criterion, a defense through aesthetics would have been possible. But then the tests above would have yielded different results. An institution that has publicly abdicated a pedagogical position cannot be defended aesthetically, because the position from which one could speak of an aesthetic criterion has been surrendered by the institution itself.

Limitation of the test

The test checks what the institution says publicly. It does not check what the institution thinks privately. It is possible that inside the Academy, in closed board discussions, in private correspondence among members, there exists an aesthetic consensus that simply does not reach the outside. It is possible that the new 2022–2026 electorate votes by a stable tacit criterion that a researcher with access to the voters could reconstruct. If such a reconstruction is ever carried out (through interview-based research or through analysis of voting patterns at scale), the findings of this report may have to be refined. The test asserts only one thing: at the level of the institution's public communication, there is no new aesthetic formulation. That does not rule out its existence at the level of private habitus, but it does rule out its existence at the level of an institutional position the Academy could defend in public debate.

A second limitation concerns the genre categories. Outside the Big Four — in Best R&B Album, Best Jazz Vocal Album, Best Classical Instrumental Solo, and the like — aesthetic criteria can be more concrete, because the genre itself sets the frame. These categories are structurally closer to traditional peer review (experts within a genre judging works within a genre) and are less affected by the 2020–2022 reform. The test focuses on the Big Four as the categories that define Grammy's institutional narrative, and where the emptiness of the sacred center becomes most visible.

VII. The empty house: ceremonial ritual after the public abdication of pedagogical responsibility (2022–2026)

A stage without a host

By 2025–2026 the structural effect of the two-phase process becomes visible on the ceremony itself. The Grammy stage, which for seventy years publicly looked like a space where the institution in the role of teacher demonstrated to the mass audience its decisions about what is important, is turning into a platform on which each participant uses the microphone for his or her own purposes. This is not a failure of the ceremony. It is the logical consequence of the institution having publicly abdicated the role of host of its own stage.

2026 was the culmination of this shift. Bad Bunny (biography in section VI), accepting Best Música Urbana Album: "Before I say thanks to God, I'm gonna say ICE out. We're not savage. We're not animals. We're not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans" [9]. Billie Eilish (biography in section VI), accepting Song of the Year: "No one is illegal on stolen land. Fuck ICE is all I want to say" [9]. Olivia Dean, a 26-year-old British singer of Jamaican-Guyanese descent, granddaughter of a Windrush-generation immigrant. With her second album "The Art of Loving" (2025) she became the first female solo artist in UK history to place four singles in the Top 10 simultaneously. Winner of Best New Artist 2026, on accepting the award: "I'm up here as a granddaughter of an immigrant. I wouldn't be here. I am a product of bravery, and I think that those people deserve to be celebrated" [9]. The New York Times described 2026 as having "featured more political speeches than any major awards show in several years" [11].

From the Alexandrian standpoint, what is happening admits a precise description. A ceremonial ritual in its classical form (Durkheim, Alexander) presupposes that there is a host of the ceremony whose mandate sets what the ceremony is about. The host acts as the steward of the sacred center: he gives the laureate the floor, and the laureate speaks about what made his work worthy of the award. That is the traditional acceptance speech, addressed to the team, the song, the genre, a particular musical decision. Its form is set not by a requirement of modesty but by the structure of the ritual: the laureate receives consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) from an institution that can explain what it consecrates and by that explanation teaches the audience how to discern.

In the empty house this form does not work. The institution has publicly abdicated the right to define what is important. Into the vacated space each laureate comes with his or her own. Bad Bunny comes with the subject of Puerto Rico and ICE. Eilish comes with a political statement on immigration. Dean comes with an immigrant's biography. This is not a criticism of the laureates. Bad Bunny has every reason to say what he says in the context of 2026 ICE policy. Eilish has every reason to voice her position. The constraint is different. Their statements structurally substitute for what the Academy publicly declined to formulate. The Academy does not explain why "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS" is the best album of the year, because the Academy is no longer in the position from which that could be said. Nor does the laureate explain it, because no one has obliged him to: there is no host of the ceremony setting the frame. Into the void left by both, a political statement unfolds. The ceremony becomes political not because the artists have become more radical, but because, after the host's public abdication of the stewardship role, each participant uses the stage for his or her own purposes.

Audience reaction and fragmentation

The rating for 2026 came to 14.41 million viewers, a fall of 6.43% from 2025 [9][10]. The drop was the second in a row (after −9.9% in 2025), and it occurred despite a number of factors that ought to have worked in the opposite direction. Bad Bunny's win was a historic moment for Spanish-language music. Kendrick Lamar set the record as the most-awarded rapper in history (27 awards). Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift were on the air. The audience was not leaving for lack of interesting moments, but because of the cumulative sense of the ceremony as a political event that part of the viewership does not want to watch.

The fragmentation of the 2026 audience is registered through a parallel metric. Grammy became the most socially active TV program of the past six months: 74.8 million social interactions, 302.5 million video views [10]. This means the mass audience has not disappeared; it has redistributed. Those who did not watch the whole ceremony on television watched fragments of it on social networks. This is a qualitatively different type of participation from the traditional ceremonial ritual. A televised ceremonial ritual requires a collective temporal act (we all watch at the same time, we all participate in the moment), whereas social-network consumption consists in the sequential intake of clips selected by an algorithm or by the user.

Alexandrian significance of this shift. Ceremonial ritual in the classical sense requires collective presence, even if that presence is mediated. Television broadcast worked as a collective act because it in fact gathered a mass of viewers at one time around one screen (in different homes, but still). Social-network consumption destroys this temporal collectivity. Fragments are seen at different times, in different contexts, each selected to fit a particular algorithmic profile. The central sacred object (Album of the Year) is not produced for a collective audience, because a collective audience no longer exists. It is produced for a set of algorithmically segmented sub-groups that will never see the same fragment.

A change of stage: the end of the CBS era

In 2024 CBS did not renew its contract with the Recording Academy to broadcast the Grammys after fifty years of carriage (since 1973). From 2027 the ceremony moves to ABC/Disney under a ten-year agreement with simulcast on Disney+ and Hulu [a][10]. 2026 was the last year of Grammy on CBS. In ceremonial terms this means a change of the stage on which the external ritual is performed.

A change of stage is not a neutral commercial event. CBS for seventy years was a specific media object, with its own audience, its own broadcast style, its own culture. Grammy-on-CBS was a specific cultural product. A ceremony of a specific length (3.5 hours), with a concrete advertising structure, embedded in the grid of broadcast entertainment. ABC/Disney with simulcast on streaming platforms means a different type of ceremonial ritual. On one side, wider availability through the addition of streaming. On the other, dissolution into the general flow of Disney content, where Grammy becomes one event among many in an ecosystem, rather than the main evening on a single channel.

Trevor Noah announced 2026 as his last year as host [7]. This is a formal coincidence with the CBS departure, but structurally the two events are coupled. The host who for five years kept the ceremony in a mode of "apolitical comedic sympathy" [7] is leaving at the same time as the stage changes. The next Grammy season will have a new stage (ABC/Disney), a new host (name not announced at the time of this report), and will retain the old problems: an empty sacred signifier, a demographic proxy metric in place of an aesthetic code, an asymmetrically de-fused double ritual. Changing the décor does not solve any of these problems, but it does make them visible in a new context.

Retroactive evidence: Grammy 2012 as a vanished regime

For contrast, one figure is worth recalling. In 2012 Grammy drew 39.9 million viewers [6]. That was the year immediately after the death of Whitney Houston (February 11, 2012), and the February 12 ceremony became an improvised memorial. The figure of 39.9 million is not a norm for Grammy in the 2010s; it is a peak tied to a specific event. But this peak attests to the scale of mass audience Grammy was able to gather at that time. The 2026 rating (14.4 million) is 36% of the 2012 peak.

The fall is not explained exclusively by media fragmentation (it affected all broadcast events) and not exclusively by the 2020–2022 reform (it affected Grammy before the reform's effects could materialize). The fall is explained by the cumulative effect of two processes. The first is media fragmentation, common to all broadcast events. The second is the loss of the double ritual specific to Grammy. The first process would have reduced Grammy's audience in any case, possibly to 18–20 million by 2026 (comparable to the trajectory of the Oscars, which fell from about 40 million in 2014 to about 19.5 million in 2025). The second process adds a specific further decline of roughly 4–5 million viewers. These viewers are not leaving other broadcast events; they are leaving Grammy, because Grammy is no longer the ceremonial ritual they recognize as their own.

Political reaction: commentary from outside

After the 2026 ceremony Donald Trump commented publicly on the Grammys on Truth Social: "The Grammy Awards are the WORST, virtually unwatchable! CBS is lucky not to have this garbage litter their airwaves any longer" [11]. This was a reaction specifically from the US president to the ceremony; in 2026 Trump is in his second term.

The episode matters structurally. In 2018 (Trump's first term) the president publicly commented on NFL protests and culturally high-reach events, but Grammy rarely fell into that list. Grammy was not a political arena. By 2026 it had become one to the point where the US president deemed it necessary to respond. This is evidence that the political content with which the laureates fill the vacated space has reached a level at which the country's political elite is compelled to react.

Trump's reaction is directed at Grammy, but Grammy as a subject does not receive it. No answer comes from the institution, nor can it: an institution that has publicly abdicated responsibility for its own function has no position from which to answer the US president. Trump's comment is a comment from outside, addressed to no one in particular. Grammy is now associated in the public picture with a specific political camp, not because the institution took a position, but because each participant on its stage speaks in his or her own voice, and those voices are politically homogeneous. This is Grammy's next structural fork: an institution that has ceased to be a subject becomes a field on which someone else's political fight is conducted.

Summary of the section

By 2026, Grammy's ceremonial ritual is running in a mode that matches none of its historical configurations. The ritual does not enact a peer consensus (the peer community has been reformed and no longer produces a coherent judgment); it does not enact synchrony with the mass audience (the audience is fragmented and continues to decline); it does not enact any internal aesthetic criterion (the institution does not formulate such a criterion). The ritual enacts a political collective act in which the laureates give politically charged speeches, the media cover it along a political axis, the president reacts, part of the audience tunes in because of the political charge, part tunes out for the same reason.

This is not re-fusion. It is not, strictly speaking, a continuation of the 2018–2021 de-fusion. It is the regime of the empty house. The Academy as the host institution has publicly abdicated the stewardship role, but the stage, the microphone, the cameras, and the broadcast infrastructure remain. They are used by participants who arrive with their own agendas. The empty-house regime may last a long time. It is stable in the sense that the ceremony can be performed every year, the rating may decline slowly, and the contract with ABC/Disney runs until 2036. But it does not return the institution to a pedagogical function. In terms of this report's hypothesis: over a five-to-ten-year horizon, Grammy in its present state is more likely to persist in the empty-house regime than to restore a pedagogical position.

VIII. The horizon: three scenarios after the public abdication of pedagogical responsibility

This section sets out three scenarios for Grammy's evolution over a 5–10-year horizon. All three start from the state after the two-phase process described in the methodology. The report's hypothesis: in none of the scenarios is a restoration of the pedagogical mandate observed as a likely outcome on this horizon. Restoration is possible in principle with a generational change of leadership and new external conditions, but these conditions are not in view on any foreseeable horizon. The extreme scenarios are presented first, the middle one last. None of the scenarios is a prediction. Each offers a logical reconstruction of where the institution could move from its current position, under certain assumptions. The aim of the section is to make the structural forks visible, not to predict the choice among them.

Extreme scenario 1: Grammy as Golden Globes

Short formula of the scenario. Grammy gradually turns from the main musical event of the year into one of many industry ceremonies, comparable in cultural weight to the Golden Globes or the Emmys. An alternative institution forms on the basis of the CMA or of another genre infrastructure that gradually expands its mandate.

The scenario's assumption is as follows. The current trajectory continues without correction. The rating of the television broadcast continues to decline at 5–10% per year. By 2032 Grammy's mass audience stabilizes around 8–10 million viewers, comparable to the Golden Globes and the Emmys. The television contract with ABC/Disney (to 2036) partly amortizes the decline through multi-platform simulcast, but the economics of the contract become a problem at the next renewal (negotiations at the end of the 2030s). The peer ritual continues to vote by a procedure in which the electorate has been entirely shaped by the 2021–2025 reform. The outcomes of the vote become less and less aligned with the professional habitus of the 1980s–1990s industry, which is disappearing naturally as older cohorts leave.

In this scenario Grammy gradually loses its function as the main industry ceremony and becomes one of many. The initiative to fill the vacated space may come from the CMA (Country Music Association) or from one of the infrastructures that were genre-bound in the 2010s and, under a weakening Grammy, could extend their mandate to an all-industry role. The CMA's closed peer structure, geographically localized in Nashville, possesses what Grammy has lost: a compact professional community with a shared formative experience and tacit but stable criteria of excellence within its own genre. The CMA's move from a genre structure to an all-industry one requires an operational decision (expansion of categories) rather than an institutional transformation.

One condition is critical for this scenario. An actor must appear who is ready to bear the costs of launching the alternative institution. This is not unconditionally available. A launch requires coordination of labels, artists, and media partners, and understandings about a boycott of the existing institution (without which the alternative does not reach critical mass). Each participant in such a coalition bears reputational risk. History shows that such coordinations rarely happen in a rush. More often they take shape as a slow drifting replacement, where one institution gradually loses prestige while another gradually gains it without an announced transition. The scenario is realized if such a drift begins, but it may take longer than the horizon of this report.

For the Alexandrian frame, what matters in this scenario is the following. Grammy does not produce its own sacrality, because it did not fill the center after the 2018–2021 de-fusion. The prize's sacrality persists on the historical capital of names (Ella Fitzgerald, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson). Historical capital depreciates over time. Each year in which the institution does not produce new sacred content of its own shortens the distance to the moment when the historical capital begins to look unsupported by current practice. An alternative institution in this scenario arrives not as the winner of a competitive contest but as a filler of a vacated space.

Extreme scenario 2: Grammy under regulatory pressure

Short formula of the scenario. Federal regulatory pressure on 501(c)(3) organizations with DEI procedures forces the Academy to roll back the 2020–2022 reform under the threat of legal consequences. The Academy finds itself caught between two pressures of equal strength (the federal regulator and the BMAC moral collective) without a language of its own for balancing between them.

The scenario's assumption is as follows. Political pressure from the current administration escalates into concrete regulatory action. Executive orders analogous to EO 14173 (concerning DEI in federal contracting and grant-making) reach private institutions through several mechanisms. IRS review of 501(c)(3) status. Disclosure requirements for the decision-making structure of organizations that receive even indirect federal benefits. DOJ investigations alleging racial or gender discrimination in membership procedures. The Recording Academy as a 501(c)(3) with EIN 95-6052058 enters the zone of potential impact.

In this scenario the Academy comes under pressure to roll back the 2020–2022 reform partially or fully. Possible concrete actions: restoration of the Nominations Review Committees under a new name; requalification of membership with removal of demographic selection criteria; public retreat from formulations such as "historic underrepresentation" and a shift to the language of "artistic merit." Each of these actions immediately meets the other half of the pressure: from BMAC, from corporate partners, from artists whose public position is tied to the reform. The Academy is forced to balance between the two pressures without a formulation of its own within which balance would be possible.

In the Alexandrian frame this scenario corresponds to a situation in which unsettledHabitus broken or threatened; manifestos and declarations signal instability (Swidler) culture cannot stabilize, because none of the possible new settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) configurations has enough institutional support. The Academy finds itself in a mode of continuous crisis. Every action produces a contradictory reaction, and any attempt to restore a settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) state breaks down quickly. For the ceremonial ritual this means a continuation of the current regime plus additional pressure from the regulatory context. It is important to note that this scenario does not return the pedagogical mandate. Regulatory pressure is external interference in a house without a host, not the return of the host. Even under a full reversal of the demographic quotas, the Academy does not return to the role of institution-teacher: the very act of yielding to the regulator piles onto the public abdication of 2018–2022 as one more gesture of weakness, not as its repeal.

A specific form of this scenario: the Academy partially meets the regulatory requirements (for instance, by removing explicit demographic criteria from procedures) but preserves the reform at the level of tacit practice (continuing to recruit through genre and regional channels that de facto produce the same demographic outcome). This creates an institutional duality between formal rules and actual practice. Such duality is operationally possible, but it leaves the institution vulnerable to the next political cycle, which may demand either more consistency in reform or more consistency in rollback.

Middle scenario: Grammy as a living fossil

Short formula of the scenario. Neither of the extreme scenarios is realized in full. Grammy stabilizes at 10–14 million viewers, keeping its career value for the industry and losing its role as the main cultural event. The peer ritual and the ceremonial ritual diverge not through conflict but through mutual indifference.

The scenario's assumption is as follows. Neither of the two extreme scenarios is realized in full. Political pressure remains at the level of public criticism without regulatory action. No alternative institution reaches critical mass for replacement. The Academy continues reforms, cautiously correcting individual procedures but without changing the base type of the institution. The rating of the television broadcast stabilizes at 10–14 million viewers, comparable to the Oscars and the Emmys, which is enough to sustain the contract with ABC/Disney but no longer generates a general cultural event.

In this scenario Grammy gradually ceases to be the main musical event of the year and becomes one of several large industry ceremonies. The function of the prize shifts. It remains significant for the industry as an instrument of career capitalization (a laureate status is useful in negotiations with labels and promoters), but loses its role as arbiter of mass cultural legitimacy. The industry continues to participate in the ritual; the mass audience gradually shifts to a mode of fragmentary social-network consumption. Grammy survives as an institution, but ceases to be the center of the musical year, remaining one of its events.

For the double ritual this means a separation that before 2018 was unimaginable. The internal peer ritual continues to work for the industry (voting, presentation, career value of laureate status). The external ceremonial ritual continues to exist as a television event but gradually loses its status as collective. The industry watches its part of the ceremony and lives by it. The mass audience picks fragments and keeps contact through social networks. Neither side any longer needs the other to participate in its ritual.

The Alexandrian significance of the middle scenario is the following. It is a soft regime of institutional involution. The institution is not destroyed, but it loses one of its two functions (the function of the main ceremonial ritual) while retaining the other (peer consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) of the industry). This is the most probable trajectory if one assumes no sharp catalysts pushing in either extreme direction. The scenario does not predict drama; it predicts a gradual turn of Grammy from a cultural event into an industry event.

What will decide between the scenarios

Three variables stand out as potentially critical for the fork.

First variable: the behavior of the largest artists (Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny). Their presence or absence at the ceremony has a year-by-year effect on the rating and on the cultural weight of the event. If one of them publicly announces a boycott (as The Weeknd did in 2021), this accelerates scenario 1 and creates a precedent for the others. If they all remain participants, the middle scenario is more stable.

Second variable: the state of regulatory pressure in 2027–2030. The current Trump administration maintains pressure on the DEI infrastructure through executive orders, federal contracts, and investigations. If this pressure escalates to concrete actions against 501(c)(3)s with DEI procedures, scenario 2 becomes likely. If the pressure remains rhetorical, the middle scenario is likely.

Third variable: the willingness of industry actors to coordinate around an alternative institution. This is the least predictable variable, because coordination of this kind requires a specific constellation of interests: a coalition of major labels, high-profile artists, a media platform ready to invest in an alternative broadcast. Coordination may arise if Grammy continues to decline in ratings and begins to look vulnerable, or may fail to arise if the industry continues to treat Grammy as a "good enough" institution for current needs.

Overlaying the three variables yields a matrix of eight possible trajectories, but at the level of general description the three scenarios above remain the principal ones. The report does not predict which trajectory will be realized. Its task is to show what structural forks exist and by what mechanisms the institution will move through them.

IX. Comparative frame

Grammy in comparison with other institutions

The structure of Grammy becomes clearer when laid next to other institutions that produce consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu). The seven types of consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) summarized in the table below give a horizon for comparison. Grammy does not yield an eighth type of establishment. It yields the parameter of the pedagogical mandate, which runs orthogonally to the type of consecrationInstitutional act of consecration: an agent endows an object or person with symbolic capital (Bourdieu) and is in different states at the other institutions.

Grammy differs from the rest along three parameters.

First: Grammy has passed through both phases of the process in full. The process here is the trajectory of an institution through the loss of a functioning certification cycle (first phase) and the construction of a new cycle under a new advertising language (second phase). The pedagogical function, subordinate to the certification cycle, is lost together with it in the first phase and rebuilt together with it in the second. Other institutions in the series stand at different points on this or an analogous trajectory. Iowa has kept its primary pedagogical function through a format that does not depend on the mass market. The NEA has kept its function by leaning on the federal sanction of its mandate. AMPAS carried out an early modernization (2016–2020) that preserved for it a partial pedagogical authority and an autonomous cultural work. The Ford Foundation attempted modernization through Walker but has to a significant degree also shifted toward a public abdication of responsibility for its prior function. Disney has undergone a partial abdication in content. Netflix never claimed a pedagogical position, working on the algorithmic principle. Grammy has gone furthest in the public redefinition of its prior work as untenable and in the replacement of the prior certification language with a new one.

Second: the visibility of the code is described for Grammy differently than for the other institutions. Before 2018, Grammy had not a "hidden code" but an absent code, held in place by the pedagogical mandate through the taste-shaping instruments. An empty sacred signifier is not the same as a code hidden from the audience. The former means that the content was never formulated, and that the institution compensated with a mandate. The latter means that the content exists, but the audience does not see it. The Ford Foundation had a hidden code: Walker wrote a manifesto; the audience did not read it, but it existed. Grammy had no code in this sense: there was nothing to write, because the mandate compensated for the absence.

Third: the mechanism of replacing the emptiness with a proxy metric (representation) is specific to Grammy. The other institutions that went through DEI reform (AMPAS, Ford, the NEA) had their own sacred code into which DEI content was embedded as a new dimension. Grammy had nothing to embed into, because the central structure was empty and was only compensated by the mandate. A demographic metric took the functional place freed up by the loss of the mandate. This gives Grammy a specific vulnerability. The institution's sacred signifier is now entirely defined by an external proxy metric, and if the political context in which that metric works changes, Grammy has no backup sacred code to turn to.

Fourth: the content of the second-phase narrative at Grammy is specific. The institution grounded the DEI reform in the construction of a false history of its own bias. "Historic underrepresentation" of Black artists and women in the register of laureates as the basis for the reform is empirically unsupported (fact-check in section VI). This distinguishes Grammy from the other institutions in the series not only by how deep it has moved through the second phase, but by the character of that phase's content. Iowa MFA in an analogous period (2015–2020) could likewise have constructed a narrative of its own bias and, through it, abdicated responsibility for the pedagogical function. Iowa did not do so. AMPAS, after #OscarsSoWhite, acknowledged pointwise problems in diversifying procedure but did not rewrite its history as systematically racist. Grammy went further: it not only abdicated responsibility for the pedagogical function publicly, but fabricated a false basis for that abdication. This is a distinct level of intellectual dishonesty not observed in the other institutions in the series.

Two-phase loss of the pedagogical function as a comparative axis

The two-phase process described in the methodology works as a comparative axis that sorts institutions within the series.

First phase (missed modernization). For each institution there is a period when a new infrastructure (digital for Grammy and Disney, plebiscitary for Ford, national identity-based for NEA, market globalization for Netflix, demographic shift for AMPAS, literary pluralism for Iowa) emerges and changes the conditions under which the institution operates. Some institutions carry out reform themselves during this period (Iowa's 1980s–2000s renewal of the seminar format; AMPAS's 2016 #OscarsSoWhite as an early public response). Others miss the moment and arrive at 2018–2020 without modernization (Grammy, to a significant degree Ford). A missed modernization does not predetermine the second phase, but it raises the probability that the second phase will be traversed not through defense of the function, but through public redefinition.

Second phase (public reaction to pressure). When external pressure becomes visible through a specific event (Portnow 2018 for Grammy, #OscarsSoWhite 2015 for AMPAS, the Walker era of the early 2010s for Ford), the institution has a choice between two paths. Defense of the pedagogical function in a truncated form: acknowledge the missed modernization, accept a narrower reach, but hold on to the role itself. Public redefinition of the prior function as untenable: declare the old position problematic and rebuild the institution in the language of apology. Iowa MFA chose defense (reaffirmed the pedagogical format, updated its composition, preserved the mandate, did not construct a false history of bias). AMPAS chose a mixed path: part of the reforms in defense mode, part in concession mode (Academy Aperture 2020 as a concession on specific points, but not on the role of the institution as arbiter of cinema, and not on the foundation of a false narrative of systemic bias). The Ford Foundation under Walker tried to modernize the mandate, but then shifted toward public abdication in a number of programs. Grammy chose full public redefinition on the basis of a constructed narrative of historical bias.

This axis explains why the same external conditions (BLM, DEI pressure, regulatory shifts) produce different outcomes in different institutions. It is not about demography, not about the political camp of the leadership, not about geography. It is about two things. First: how much internal resource for retaining the role the institution had preserved at the moment of the second phase. Iowa retained, because the pedagogical format (a two-year seminar) gives the institution an internal resource for defending the role independent of external instruments. The NEA retained, because the federal mandate provides a structural defense. AMPAS retained partially, because an early modernization preserved the staff and conceptual resource for defense. Grammy came to 2018 without this resource: its pedagogical mandate rested on the industry's monopoly over distribution, the monopoly was dismantled by digital platforms between 2000 and 2015, and no internal reform occurred during that period. Second: whether the institution is willing to construct a false narrative of its own prior bias as a ground for abdicating responsibility for a pedagogical function. Iowa did not take that path. AMPAS did not. Grammy did. This is a structural choice, not a forced consequence of circumstances, and it adds to the difference between Grammy and the rest a qualitative, not merely quantitative, dimension.

Declarability of mandate and mode of representation as a second comparative axis

To the two-phase loss as a first comparative axis the report adds a second. It is assembled from two parameters introduced in the methodology: declarability of the pedagogical mandate and the mode of representation in which the institution operates. Together these two parameters give each institution in the series a structural characterization independent of the depth of its passage through the two-phase process. The axis explains why different institutions have differing capacities to defend their function publicly.

Declared mandate, representative expert form. Iowa Writers' Workshop. The institution publicly declares itself a pedagogical one. A master's program in creative writing, two-year format, declared instruction in writing. Peer representation here works as a representation of a literary tradition: instructors and visiting writers represent the professional community of literature, students represent the next generation. The addressee of the pedagogical function is defined: the students of the program. The criterion for selecting representatives is transparent: literary publications, recognition in the professional community, pedagogical ability. The substance of the judgment is reproduced by the institution: each seminar is a public act of parsing a text with formulation of criteria. Such an institution can be defended openly. Criticism is perceived as a discussion of pedagogy, not as a scandal about genealogy. When Iowa meets diversification pressure (2015–2020), it can respond in a pedagogical register: discuss which voices should be heard in the program without abdicating the pedagogical role. Structurally this is the most stable configuration in the series.

Declared mandate, representative state form. The National Endowment for the Arts. The institution publicly declares itself pedagogical (support of arts, development of American cultural life), and representation is provided through a federal mandate. Peer representation here works as representation of the professional community through peer panels sanctioned by the government. The criterion for selecting representatives is transparent and formalized (peer panels, published procedures). The substance of the judgment is partly reproduced (published grant decisions, mission statements), partly kept within peer expertise. The addressee of the pedagogical function is broad (development of American cultural life), but at this layer declarability is vulnerable to political attack. The strong side of this configuration: the federal mandate protects against market and platform competition. The weak side: political vulnerability, visible in periodic attacks on the NEA's budget since 1989.

Semi-declared mandate, representative peer form. AMPAS. The institution formally presents itself as a prize ("Academy Award"), but a tie to the pedagogy of cinema is institutionally acknowledged: the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, the Archive, educational programs, public lectures, a connection to film schools. Peer representation works through Academy membership with industry verification. The criterion for selecting representatives: professional achievement in cinema with verification in the corresponding guilds. The substance of the judgment is reproduced partly (post-ceremony interviews, trade-press coverage, behind-the-scenes documentaries about selections). The addressee of the pedagogical function is implicitly defined: the world audience of cinema. Semi-declarability means the institution can defend its pedagogical side without revealing it as its constitutive function. This affords tactical flexibility: criticism of a peer judgment can be reformulated as criticism of a pedagogical mission and rebutted (or accepted with correction) without a structural crisis.

Undeclared mandate, representative peer form (with constitutive undeclarability). Grammy. The institution publicly presents itself as an industry prize ("artistic achievement peer consensus"). A pedagogical function has in fact existed (the shaping of mass taste through the taste-shaping instruments), but it was never publicly articulated. Undeclaredness is not accidental; it is constitutive (section I). A public articulation of the pedagogical function would have required the 1957 genealogy to be exposed, which would have undermined the legitimating structure of the institution. This is the most vulnerable configuration in the series: the institution cannot defend what it does not publicly declare, and cannot begin declaring without destroying its own foundations. When the pressure of the second phase arrives, defense is possible only through languages that do not require articulation of the pedagogical function. A false history of institutional bias is one such language.

Transition to fictitious representation. Grammy after the 2020–2022 reform preserved the form of representation, but its content underwent the three dimensions of fictitiousness examined in detail in section IV: by the criterion for selecting representatives, by the substance of the judgment, and in relation to the represented. This is a transition to a separate structural category that is so far unique within the series. Iowa, NEA, AMPAS, and Ford have not transitioned to fictitious representation. Iowa has preserved pedagogical expertise. The NEA has preserved peer panels with professional verification. AMPAS carried out Academy Aperture 2020 without abolishing the professional branch committees and without losing the substantive reproduction of judgment. Ford has shifted toward public abdication in a number of programs, but not through fictitious representation on three dimensions, but through a direct change of language (from "economic opportunity" to "inequality and justice"). Grammy is the only institution in the series to which the diagnosis of fictitious representation applies on all three dimensions simultaneously.

Two comparative axes together. The first axis (depth of passage through the two-phase process) describes the institution by its trajectory over time. The second axis (declarability of mandate and mode of representation) describes the institution by its structural configuration. The two axes yield different kinds of information. The first on its own would let us say: Grammy has moved through the process more deeply than the others. The second on its own would let us say: Grammy is the only institution with constitutive undeclarability and a transition to fictitious representation. Together the axes allow a more precise statement: the depth of Grammy's passage through the process is not accidental; it is structurally conditioned by the second axis. An institution with constitutive undeclarability of its mandate, when it meets pressure, has no defense language that does not destroy its own foundations; the only path available is a move through a language that does not require articulating the function; such a move leads to fictitious representation; and fictitious representation is the deepest form of second-phase passage. The link between the axes is not logically necessary, but structurally prognostic: with constitutive undeclarability a deep second phase is not inevitable, but it is probable.

Degree of commercialization of representative form as a third comparative axis

To the two axes described the report adds a third. It concerns the degree to which an institution's representative form serves the commercial interests of its founders and participants, as distinct from autonomous cultural or educational goals. The axis is introduced explicitly here in order to place Grammy correctly in the series of institutions, each of which has its own balance of pedagogical and commercial functions.

Iowa Writers' Workshop. Minimal commercialization of the representative form in the series. The program exists inside a state university (the University of Iowa), funded primarily out of the state budget plus federal grants plus student tuition. Instructors work on an academic salary, not on profit. The pedagogical function is not subordinated to a commercial cycle: the graduates are not a product, and raising their "value" is not the program's principal aim. Graduates' literary reputation returns to the program as a reputational asset that affects the attraction of the next cohort of students and of grants, but this return effect works within an academic economy, not an advertising one. As a representative institution, Iowa barely performs the function of corporate-cycle symbolic certification.

NEA. Mixed commercialization. The NEA is a federal state body; direct commercial interests are absent, but its grants produce a commercial certification effect for the recipients: an NEA grant raises an artist's market value, increases the likelihood of obtaining other grants, and helps attract private funding. This effect is collateral, not targeted. The NEA declares itself an institution for the development of American cultural life, and that mission is not subordinated to a commercial goal. The certification effect exists as a derivative of state recognition, not as its basis.

AMPAS. High commercialization. The Academy is partly funded by the Motion Picture Academy Foundation and by membership dues, but the main source of income is the television contract with ABC for broadcasting the ceremony ("the Oscars"), measured in hundreds of millions of dollars per cycle. This contract works as the institution's main commercial asset. At the same time, an "Oscar" as a certificate raises the box office of films, prolongs their theatrical life, and raises the market value of laureate filmmakers in subsequent projects. AMPAS is an institution in which the commercial function is significant but does not exhaust the institutional work: the Academy also contains a museum, an archive, educational programs, and a connection to film schools. The corporate cycle of symbolic certification operates in parallel with a declared pedagogical function.

Ford Foundation. Medium commercialization, specific in type. Ford is a private charitable foundation with an endowment of about 16 billion dollars. Its grants do not certify commercial products in the market sense; they certify academic, cultural, and social projects. But certification works: a Ford grant raises a project's legitimacy, eases the path to further grants from other sources, and raises the reputational status of the recipient. This is certification in the non-profit sector, but structurally it performs functions parallel to commercial certification: it raises the value of an asset for those who have invested in it (time, reputation, money). Commercialization here is not through a direct market but through the non-profit project economy.

Grammy. Maximum commercialization of the representative form in the series. The Academy was founded by commercial labels in 1957 as a corporate cycle of symbolic certification of their own products. Main revenue sources: the television contract (CBS to 2025, ABC/Disney from 2025 to 2036), membership dues, and partnerships with labels and streaming platforms. All institutional work is subordinated to the certification function: the Grammy stamp on an album works as an advertising label that raises sales and extends catalog life. There is no parallel autonomous cultural component comparable to AMPAS's Academy Museum or to Ford's research program. The Grammy Museum exists, but its scale and institutional weight are not comparable to the Academy's main certification work. The pedagogical function the institution performed for seventy years worked as a subordinate element of the certification cycle, not as an autonomous cultural goal (methodology, section I, subsection on the corporate cycle).

Three axes together. The combined application of the three axes gives Grammy the following structural position in the series. On the first axis (depth of passage through the process), Grammy has moved through both phases in full. On the second (declarability and mode of representation), Grammy is the only institution with constitutive undeclarability and a transition to fictitious representation. On the third (degree of commercialization), Grammy is the only institution with maximum commercialization of the representative form. The three axes work synergistically. Maximum commercialization makes constitutive undeclarability necessary, because an open acknowledgment of the commercial nature would zero out the certification effect. Constitutive undeclarability determines the depth of passage through the second phase, because the institution has no language of open defense. Deep passage through the second phase ends in a transition to fictitious representation as the only move compatible with undeclaredness. Grammy's structural specificity is the result of the joint work of three parameters, not of isolated particularities. That explains why Grammy is not simply one more institution in the series, but the most telling case of a general process.

Grammy and AMPAS: the difference of an identical ritual

The comparison with AMPAS deserves a separate paragraph, because on the surface the two institutions look structurally identical. A voter academy votes, the ceremony shows the result, the mass audience recognizes the laureates as the main cultural events of the year. Both institutions went through DEI reform in 2020. Both were subjected to criticism for "woke capture." The difference between them, however, is fundamental.

AMPAS had and preserves its own sacred code, organized around a specific type of cinematic achievement. The code was articulated in selection criteria (Academy Aperture 2025, the RAISE criteria for Best Picture after 2020), in how the categories are set up, in the history of laureates. When AMPAS undergoes reform, it embeds DEI into an existing aesthetic language. The reconsideration stays inside the same ritual; only which films are counted as excellent changes.

Grammy had and has no sacred code of its own formulated in substantive terms. When Grammy underwent reform, it did not embed DEI into its own aesthetic language (it had no aesthetic language of its own), but replaced the absence of that language with a proxy metric. This means that Grammy after 2021 structurally lacks what AMPAS has: an aesthetic judgment of its own that can be defended aesthetically. In a discussion AMPAS can say "this film is better, because X" (where X designates a concrete category of film language). Grammy in an analogous discussion cannot say "this album is better, because Y," because Y does not exist for it.

Grammy and Iowa MFA: mirror cases of emptiness

Another instructive comparative case is Iowa MFA. The two institutions look different on the surface. Iowa is an educational program with a pedagogical ritual. Grammy is a ceremonial prize with a double ritual. But they have something in common: neither has a sacred code formulated in a public document. At Iowa the code can be reconstructed only through external research (Bennett, Dowling, McGurl); at Grammy the code is defined only negatively and has never acquired positive content.

The difference between them is in how the absence of a code shows up and what follows from it. At Iowa the code exists as a tacit habitus built into the seminar procedure and transmitted through the two years of instruction. A real code exists (more Hemingway, less Dos Passos); it simply is not written down as a document. Because of this Iowa is robust to attacks on the content of the code. The content cannot be quoted, because it is not fixed; one can criticize only its effects — the production of a particular type of literature. At Grammy the code is absent at the level of substance entirely. There is no tacit habitus defining what excellence is, because the peer community was historically too broad and too heterogeneous in genre to have a single habitus of taste. Iowa closed its ritual (one seminar, one teaching team, one pedagogical line), and it is precisely this that allowed a tacit habitus to develop. Grammy did not close its ritual, and no habitus took shape.

It follows that in the 2020s the Iowa reform and the Grammy reform are solving structurally different problems. Iowa changes who comes in; the format stays the same. Grammy changes who comes in and at the same time tries to fill an absent aesthetic center, because it has no equivalent of "a format that reproduces itself independently of composition." At Iowa the format itself works as a mechanism for transmitting the code. At Grammy the voting procedure merely sums individual judgments; it does not form them. When the composition of voters changes, the result changes, because there is no procedure producing a unified professional reflex in the electorate. Iowa can expand the demographics of its students and keep operational continuity; Grammy cannot, because it has nothing with which to secure continuity.

Two critical positions and why both miss

The public discussion of the Recording Academy's 2020–2022 reform runs in two clearly marked camps. Both formulate strong arguments against the other side. Both miss the structural problem set out in this report.

The progressivist position. Leading voices: Jon Caramanica (The New York Times), Ann Powers (NPR), the Pitchfork and Rolling Stone circle. Core thesis: before 2018 the Academy was a conservative peer club that systematically underrated hip-hop, R&B, women, and Black artists. The Macklemore vs. Lamar episode of 2014, the absence of Kendrick Lamar from Album of the Year in those same years, Mariah Carey's 1996 nomination without a win, decades of boycotts by Jay-Z and Kanye West are offered as evidence of a systemic defect in peer judgment. The 2020–2022 reform is described as a belated correction of this defect. The expansion of the electorate, the dissolution of the secret committees, the demographic quotas in new membership are presented as returning the institution to its own stated mission ("the best music of the year," now applied to all music rather than only to what white men over fifty listen to).

The strong side of the progressivist position: concrete instances of the systematic passing-over of genuinely significant music are real, and quantitatively many of them exist. The weak side: the position assumes that the Academy had a working aesthetic standard that was simply being applied with a demographic bias. This report shows that no such standard ever existed. One cannot "correct the application" of a criterion the institution never formulated in substance. The reform replaced one unarticulated ground (the settledHabitus works invisibly; the question "why do we do it this way" never arises (Swidler) habitus of the senior peers) with another unarticulated ground (demographic representation), without filling the center with aesthetic content. The progressivist position fails to recognize that what it is welcoming is not a correction of the code but a change of institutional type, from peer review to crowd review with a DEI overlay.

The right-wing critique of institutional capture. Leading voices: National Review, The Federalist, The Daily Wire circle, the authors of the "woke capture" format in the music and culture sections. Core thesis: the Academy was an expert peer institution that over seventy years had developed its own standard of musical quality. The 2020–2022 reform destroyed that standard, replacing expertise with a demographic quota. The dissolution of the Nominations Review Committees in April 2021 is presented as the central act of destruction. The series of laureates in 2022–2026 (Batiste; Beyoncé, "Cowboy Carter"; Bad Bunny, "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS") is presented as evidence that the results are now determined by political pressure rather than by musical judgment.

The strong side of the right-wing critique: the dissolution of the committees did destroy the filter that for seventy years had corrected mass voting toward the professional habitus, and this is a procedural fact. The weak side: the position assumes that before 2018 the Academy held its own aesthetic standard that the reform "destroyed." This report shows that no standard in the form of a publicly formulated criterion ever existed. The committees maintained the coherence of the peer habitus, but that habitus itself was nowhere fixed as a document one could present and defend. The right-wing critique mourns a lost standard that never existed in a form in which it could have been lost. It fails to recognize that the Academy did not lose an aesthetic language — it never had one — and that the dissolution of the committees made the structural emptiness visible rather than creating it.

Both positions share a hidden assumption: that the Academy had or has some substantive aesthetic code that has been either misapplied (the progressivist version) or destroyed (the right-wing version). This report argues that the assumption is false. The code was neither misapplied nor destroyed. The code was never formulated in substance, and it is precisely this initial emptiness that makes possible a change of institutional type through the substitution of a demographic proxy metric at the moment when external pressure demands from the Academy a public answer about its own criterion. Analysis of Grammy through the Alexandrian frame removes both existing critical positions from the agenda and puts in their place a question of a deeper order: how does an institution work in the center of which a deliberately organized emptiness has been held in place for seventy years, and what happens to such an institution when it is forced to fill the emptiness?

Synchrony of the two rituals: a product of the mandate, not an accident

The structure of the ritual sets the vulnerability. Institutions with a single ritual (Disney, Netflix, Ford, NEA) exist in one audience, and the institution either keeps contact with it or loses it as a single event. Institutions with a double ritual (AMPAS, Grammy) live in a more complex configuration: two audiences, two vantage points, potentially two moments of possible divergence. But the way a double ritual holds two audiences in alignment differs from institution to institution.

At AMPAS the two audiences are held together by the shared cultural field of film. The peer community (Hollywood) and the mass audience (moviegoers) share a long history of mutual recognition through a common product: the film the academy members judge is the same film the audience watches in cinemas. The two audiences look at the same object from different positions, but see the same object. Divergences are rare and always local.

At Grammy the two audiences were held together not by a common object (as at AMPAS) but by the pedagogical mandate described in section I. The industry's peer community shaped the mass audience's taste through the taste-shaping instruments: radio, MTV, the Billboard charts, criticism, label catalogs, the CBS broadcast. This is a vertical structure, not a horizontal one. Synchronization was held not by peer and mass audience independently converging in their choices, but by the peer setting taste and the infrastructure relaying that taste to the mass audience. Seventy years is not coincidence; it is the product of the work of a pedagogical system.

This parameter lets us diagnose precisely what happened to Grammy after 2018. It is not that the sacred signifier lost its content (there was never any content), and not that the peer ritual stopped working procedurally (the procedure continues to work). What fell apart was the pedagogical system that held two audiences in hierarchical alignment. The taste-shaping instruments passed into the hands of algorithmic platforms between 2000 and 2015, and internal modernization of the peer system did not take place in that period. By 2018 the Academy's peer community had already lost the instruments of mass taste shaping, but this was concealed by the inertia of former habits. The 2018 press conference made the loss visible; the 2018–2022 public abdication cemented it. The empty sacred signifier did not collapse in 2018. It became visible in 2018, because the pedagogical system that had been concealing it had already been dismantled.

Conclusion of the comparative section

Comparison with other institutions brings to the surface four structural features that set Grammy apart.

First. Grammy is an institution without its own sacred code. The sacred is defined only through negation (excellence without regard to sales), without positive content. This distinguishes Grammy from Disney, Netflix, Ford, the NEA, and AMPAS, each of which has its code formulated explicitly, and from Iowa MFA, where the code is reconstructed from outside through a tacit habitus. Grammy has neither an explicit formulation nor a habitus to take its place. In lieu of a substantive code, Grammy for seventy years held a pedagogical mandate through the taste-shaping instruments.

Second. Grammy has passed through both phases of the process in full. Iowa preserved its mandate through a closed pedagogical format; AMPAS preserved it partly through early modernization (#OscarsSoWhite 2015, Academy Aperture 2020); the NEA preserved it through the state sanction of its mandate. Ford shifted toward public abdication, but not fully. Grammy has moved further than any other, which makes it the deepest case of the general process that other American cultural institutions have been traversing to varying degrees.

Third. Grammy differs from all other institutions in the series on the second and third comparative axes. On the second axis (declarability of mandate and mode of representation): Iowa stands in the position of a declared mandate in representative expert form; the NEA in representative state form; AMPAS in semi-declared form with preserved peer verification; Grammy in undeclared form, and in a constitutively undeclared form at that. On the third axis (degree of commercialization of representative form): Iowa minimal, NEA mixed, Ford medium through a non-profit project economy, AMPAS high with parallel autonomous cultural work, Grammy maximum without a parallel autonomous component. Grammy is the only institution in the series at which a public articulation of the pedagogical function would destroy the legitimating structure (second axis), and the only institution with maximum commercialization and no parallel autonomous cultural component (third axis). The two features are connected: maximum commercialization makes constitutive undeclarability necessary, because an open acknowledgment of the commercial nature would zero out the certification effect. Grammy is also the only institution that has transitioned to fictitious representation on all three dimensions simultaneously (selection of representatives, substance of judgment, definiteness of the represented). This is a structural specificity, not a quantitative difference with respect to the other institutions.

Fourth. After both phases of the process have been passed through, the conditions for restoring a pedagogical position are not observable on any foreseeable horizon. Attempts to criticize the Academy through the content of its new code miss, because there is no content. Attempts to defend it through an aesthetic criterion miss, because the institution itself has abdicated such a position. Attempts to criticize it through loss of representation miss, because representation in the new configuration works as a certification mechanism, and full representation is not part of its function. The only frame that lands: describe the institution by what it now does, that is, as a certification mechanism for the advertising shell of the music business. The structural features of the third point (constitutive undeclarability, maximum commercialization without autonomous cultural work, transition to fictitious representation) make restoration not simply unlikely but require multi-layered work: recognition of the 1957 genealogy, a revival of representation in its three dimensions, public acknowledgment of the commercial nature of the institution. More on this in Q5 of section XI.

X. Grammy in the broader history of the crisis of representative institutions

The preceding sections analyzed Grammy as a specific institutional case. This section introduces the context in which the case reads as a particular instance of a general phenomenon. This addition to the analysis is necessary for two reasons. First: the concrete structural parameters of Grammy (constitutive undeclarability, a transition to fictitious representation along three dimensions) repeat, with variations, the parameters observed in other Western representative institutions of the 2010s and 2020s. Second: without this context the Grammy case reads as a local pathology of a single institution, which gives a misleading picture. With the context one can see that Grammy is one of the points of intersection of general forces acting on representative institutions as a whole. This section does not answer Q1 from the open questions (the uniqueness vs. generality of the two-phase process). An answer to that question requires a comparative study that goes beyond a single report. This section only lays out the context within which such a study would be meaningful.

Representative institutions in the position of the Chamber of Commerce

The three regimes of cultural recognition introduced in the methodology operate not only in the music industry. The structural scheme applies to any field in which an intermediary institution stands between producers of cultural objects and the audience, certifying that the object deserves public attention. Academic publishing as an institution of peer review. Journalism as an institution of editorial control. Medicine as a system of peer procedures (medical committees, peer-reviewed clinical guidelines, professional associations). Museum practice as curatorial selection. Literary prizes. Grant councils. Each of these is a representative mechanism: a group of co-opted experts certifies, in the name of the profession, that this work, this article, this patient, this object, this writer, this project deserves recognition within the corresponding cultural or professional hierarchy.

Historically, each of these institutions arose in a situation structurally analogous to Grammy 1957. A representative form displaced an earlier, more direct mechanism. Modern academic peer review took shape in the mid-twentieth century, displacing more direct forms of circulating scientific knowledge through personal networks and publisher policy. Editorial control in journalism institutionalized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, replacing direct pamphleteering and the party press. Curatorial selection in museums became the norm in the nineteenth century. In each case a return to a more direct form is theoretically possible, and in each case the representative form held so long as its infrastructure worked and its legitimacy was not under systematic pressure.

Beginning roughly in 2010, pressure has been mounting in all the areas listed at once. The sources of pressure are common. Digital platforms allow producers of cultural objects to bypass the representative filter and reach audiences directly (YouTube, Substack, Bandcamp, preprint servers, social media). Algorithmic aggregation of engagement offers an alternative, "objective" criterion of recognition that competes with expert judgment. Demographic pressure inside representative institutions calls for redefinition of the criteria for selecting representatives. Political polarization undermines the presumption of a single expert consensus. Economic changes (the decline of advertising revenue in journalism, the commercialization of the academy, the concentration of grant-making resources) change the material base of representation.

The result: representative institutions in different fields pass through structurally similar trajectories. The first phase is the loss of the instruments through which representative judgment was relayed into mass habit. The second phase is the public response to that loss once it becomes visible. Among the responses available to an institution: defense of the prior representative form through acknowledgment of the missed modernization; transition to demographically redefined representation; closure of the institution; merger with a more durable structure. The choice among these paths depends on the configuration of institutional parameters, including declarability of mandate and access to languages of defense.

Parallels and differences

Preliminary observations on several institutions allow one to sketch the context. A detailed comparative study remains the task of future work. Here only the structural correspondences are outlined.

Academic peer review has gone through the same structural problem as Grammy. The infrastructure through which peer judgment was relayed into scientific reputation (bibliometrics, journal prestige hierarchies, citation-driven career evaluation) began to decay in 2000–2015 under the pressure of open archives, preprint servers, alternative metrics (altmetrics, h-index, Google Scholar). The public pressure of the second phase arrived from multiple directions: replication demands, charges of publication bias, discussions of representation in reviewing. The reforms (open reviewing, double-blind review, diversity in editorial boards, procedural transparency) are structurally parallel to the Academy's reforms. A transition to fictitious representation in the academy can be diagnosed along analogous dimensions: a partial substitution of expert selection by demographic requirements in certain disciplines; a decline in substantive reproduction of peer judgment in institutional communication; a blurring of the addressee of publication.

Editorial control in journalism has traveled the same trajectory since the 2000s. Loss of the instruments of distribution through the dominance of platforms, direct author-to-audience access through Substack and social media, algorithmic aggregation of engagement as an alternative to editorial selection. The second phase in major outlets (The New York Times, The Washington Post) has included public revisions of prior editorial policy through the lens of race and gender since 2020. This is structurally parallel to Grammy's historic-underrepresentation narrative, even though the empirical basis in each case is its own. A transition to fictitious representation can be diagnosed through changes in the composition of editorial staffs, in public communication about the principles of article selection, in the specification of the addressee.

Medical peer expertise (medical committees, guidelines, professional associations) faces the loss of a monopoly on expert authority under the pressure of the patients' movement, direct access to information (UpToDate, open medical databases), and algorithmic diagnostics. The second phase is so far less pronounced than in Grammy or journalism, but the pressure is present. Medical associations confronted with demands to redefine expert criteria through the lens of racial and gender differences in medical outcomes are going through structurally similar processes, although at a different pace.

Curatorial selection in museums and literary prizes is going through analogous transformations. Decolonization movements, deaccessioning debates, reconsideration of past collection decisions, demographic rebalancing in curatorial committees. Literary prizes (Booker, National Book Award) are going through public redefinition of criteria through the lens of diversity. In each case structural parallels to Grammy are discernible; the specific empirical configurations differ.

Limits of the analogy

Structural parallels do not entail identity of the cases. Grammy has features that distinguish it even within the general phenomenon.

First: constitutive undeclarability of the pedagogical mandate. Most representative institutions in other fields have a declared mandate: the academy openly declares itself an institution for the production of knowledge, journalism declares itself an institution of information, museums declare themselves institutions for the preservation of cultural heritage. Public articulation of their function does not expose a genealogical problem, so they can defend the function openly. Grammy is the only one of the institutions listed where an open articulation of the function would destroy the legitimating structure. This makes its case especially deep in its passage through the second phase.

Second: the scale of the mass audience. Grammy has a media audience in the tens of millions. Academic peer review, literary prizes, grant councils have audiences measured in the thousands or tens of thousands. Grammy's mass character makes its crisis more visible and more dramatic, but not more structurally telling.

Third: the speed of the process. Grammy has passed through both phases over a twenty-year interval (2000–2020). In the academy an analogous process stretches over longer periods. In medicine it is still in an early stage. Grammy's speed is partly explained by the density of its double ritual (an annual ceremony with a prime-time broadcast), which makes each crisis publicly visible.

Fourth: the content of the second-phase narrative. Grammy grounded its DEI reform in a narrative of institutional bias whose empirical inadequacy is analyzed in section VI. In other institutions the content of the second-phase narrative is specific to the case, and the empirical basis in each case is its own. In some cases the institutional-bias narrative has a real factual basis (for instance, in the academy there are documented data on bias in peer review in certain disciplines). In others the basis is exaggerated or constructed. A general observation: the institutional-bias narrative is not in itself a signal of fictitious representation; its empirical basis has to be checked separately in each specific case.

Fifth: the degree of commercialization of the representative form. This is the parameter introduced in section IX as the third comparative axis, but it works in the general context of representative institutions as well. In academic peer review the commercial cycle is weaker: academics work on university or research salaries, not on profit. Peer review produces a reputational effect for author and journal, but this effect circulates in an academic economy, not in a direct market. In journalism the commercial cycle was significant in the twentieth century (major outlets earned through advertising resting on editorial authority), but from the 2010s it has weakened: a decline in advertising revenue broke the link between editorial work and the commercial cycle, and many outlets have moved to models of philanthropic funding, subscription, or small private equity. In medicine the commercial link works through the pharmaceutical industry (peer-reviewed clinical guidelines influence drug sales), but this is not openly acknowledged, and structural conflicts of interest remain an institutional problem. In the curatorial selection of museums, commercialization depends on the funding structure: museums with corporate donors are closer to AMPAS, those with state funding closer to the NEA. Grammy represents the maximum of commercialization of representative form among the listed institutions: maximum dependency on corporate founders (the labels), maximum direct market payoff of certification (Grammy bounce, extension of catalog life), maximum embedding of institutional work in a corporate cycle. This deepens its second-phase passage: the more certification is embedded in a commercial cycle, the harder it is for the institution to publicly articulate its own function without destroying its effect. The commercialization parameter works as a multiplier on the other parameters (undeclaredness of mandate, depth of phase), not as an independent variable.

The place of Grammy in the general process

Given the parallels and the differences, Grammy reads as one of the deepest cases of the general process. Its depth is explained by a specific configuration of parameters: constitutive undeclarability of the mandate, a double ritual with a mass audience, the missed modernization of 2000–2015, the particulars of the 1957 genealogy. These parameters do not make Grammy an exception to the general process; they make it its telling case.

For understanding the general process Grammy provides material at two levels. At the first, it shows what happens to a representative institution once it has passed through both phases in their deepest form. That offers a prognostic benchmark for other institutions at earlier stages of the same process. At the second, it shows which structural parameters make the passage especially deep. Constitutive undeclarability is the key predictor of vulnerability. If this observation is confirmed by comparative research, it gives an analytical tool for evaluating other institutions: the degree of declarability of their mandate can be used as an indicator of their probable durability under second-phase pressure.

On the answer to Q1 (uniqueness vs. generality of the process) depends the applicability of this report's analytical frame to other institutions. If the process is general, the frame has prognostic power beyond Grammy. If the Grammy case is unique, the frame remains a description of a specific institution. This section does not give an answer, but it frames the context within which the question of generality becomes meaningful. The preliminary observations in this section suggest that the generality of the process is probable, but its confirmation requires empirical comparative research. This is one of the tasks of the CulturalBI series as a whole. The synthetic report 012, which closes the series, will develop this very question on the basis of the accumulated material from reports on individual institutions.

XI. Open questions

Q1. The report describes the two-phase loss of the Academy's pedagogical function as a specific process in the American music industry of 2000–2022. Open question: is this process unique to Grammy and the music industry, or is it a particular case of a broader cultural shift in which many American institutions are simultaneously abdicating responsibility for a pedagogical function? Preliminary observations of adjacent institutions (universities, medical academies, journalism, MFA literary programs, the Ford Foundation, the NEA, AMPAS) suggest that the process may be general, but its trajectory and depth vary. A comparative study tracing the process across different types of institutions with different taste-shaping infrastructures could show whether Grammy is an especially deep case of a general process or a standalone phenomenon. The prognostic power of the frame described depends on the answer to this question: if the process is general, the frame can be extended to other institutions with predictive force; if local, the frame remains a description of the specific Recording Academy case.

Q2. Section VIII sets out three scenarios for Grammy's evolution, but they rest on the assumption that the institution will continue to exist in its current form. A fourth scenario, not developed at length in the report, is the possibility that the Recording Academy itself initiates a deep reconfiguration. The Academy could separate the peer prize (closed, for the industry) from the broadcast event (open, for the mass audience). The two rituals that for seventy years had worked inside a single shell would split into two different events. The precedent exists: IFTA has separated a closed industry prize from the public ceremony. For Grammy this would require a rethinking of the relationship with its media partner, the industry's agreement to a reduced media weight for the prize, and a decision on how to relate the peer prize to public coverage. The probability of such a reconfiguration cannot be estimated, but the structural possibility exists, and a future study could separately analyze the conditions for it.

Q3. The Weeknd in 2020 is described in the report as a publicly significant moment of rupture between peer selection and mass taste. But the behavior of other major artists after 2020 is not uniform. Beyoncé publicly criticized the Academy after several ceremonies, but continued to participate and ultimately won Album of the Year in 2025, though she had been nominated seven times before without winning. Taylor Swift participates regularly and accepts awards. Kendrick Lamar won 27 awards by 2026, but in 2014 (the Macklemore episode) he was publicly passed over. Different reactions by different artists to the same institution call for explanation. On one hypothesis, the reaction depends on how close the artist is to the core of the peer community. Older laureates stay; younger artists without accumulated capital are more inclined to boycott. On another hypothesis, the reaction depends on the artist's commercial position. Artists with massive fan bases can more easily do without Grammy legitimation; artists in an intermediate position need Grammy more. Verification of these hypotheses requires a separate study and may alter the picture presented in the report.

Q4. The Gramscian report [Recording Academy (Grammy): DEI — Capturing the Institutional Megaphone in 16 Months] formulated the hypothesis of an emerging alternative institution, which this report treats as the extreme scenario 1. The Gramscian report suggests the CMA with its Nashville infrastructure as a candidate. The structural argument for the CMA is as follows. A closed professional community, genre-homogeneous, geographically localized, possesses what the Academy has lost: a tacit habitus of excellence with no need for articulation. This report accepts the argument but notes a constraint. As a genre infrastructure the CMA is built around country. Extending it to other genres requires either giving up the genre specificity (risking loss of its own durability) or building a new infrastructure alongside the CMA base (which is technically complex). A separate institutional study could examine which path of expansion is structurally more reliable, and under what conditions it might be launched. This lies outside the scope of the Alexandrian analysis of Grammy.

Q5. Is a trajectory of honest restoration of the Academy as a pedagogical institution possible in principle? Not through acknowledgment of a false past injustice (which would be an additional lie on top of the one already constructed), but through simultaneous work on five levels, each of which brings the institution into a register it has previously avoided.

First level: acknowledgment of the 1957 genealogy. The Academy arose as an act of seizing the function of public recognition from the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, carried out by the five labels for the sake of preserving their symbolic capital. This founding act was framed in the peer language of professional recognition rather than as an open pedagogical claim, which is what made the undeclaredness of the pedagogical mandate constitutive. Honest restoration requires public acknowledgment of this genealogy. The Academy must say: we are an institution that has held, for seventy years, the function of shaping mass taste without naming it publicly, because an open articulation of that function in 1957 would have been politically impossible. This is a radical act of institutional candor that destroys the prior defensive architecture (constitutive undeclaredness is shifted to declaredness), but opens the way to the next three levels.

Second level: acknowledgment of the real missed modernization. Not a false institutional bias, which at the scale described did not exist, but the real institutional failure of 2000–2015. The taste-shaping infrastructure fragmented, the return to direct democracy through digital platforms was visible in real time, the peer elite did not modernize its own instruments and did not build a new infrastructure capable of working in the new media environment. This is a concrete, datable, institutionally owned failure. Its public acknowledgment requires the Academy to name the real problem, not a constructed one. Public acknowledgment of the real failure is the condition for any serious reform: an institution cannot modernize around a correct diagnosis while it clings to a false one.

Third level: formulation of an aesthetic criterion in a metamodern frame. Not modernist (objective excellence as a fact) and not postmodernist (all standards as conventions of power), but a mature, substantive position that understands its own historical and cultural conditioning while still giving testable and discussable judgments about what good music is. The criterion must be formulated institutionally (on behalf of the Academy, not only of individual voters), be open to criticism and correction, and work as a pedagogical formulation for the mass audience, not only for the peer community. This is the constitutive work the Academy has avoided for seventy years, sheltering behind undeclaredness.

Fourth level: restoration of representation in its three dimensions. The fictitious representation diagnosed in section IV has to be replaced with a working one. That means: restoration of parallel verification of professional competence alongside demographic criteria (first dimension). Public reproduction by the institution of representatives' judgment as a substantive statement about the work, not only as the procedural fact of the vote (second dimension). Definition of the boundaries of the represented community, in which the Academy speaks on behalf of concrete musicians and a concrete audience rather than of an abstract "music community in its diversity" (third dimension).

Fifth level: acknowledgment of the commercial nature of the institution. The deepest layer, requiring the Academy to publicly acknowledge its own institutional function. The Academy was founded by commercial labels in 1957 and has since operated as a corporate cycle of symbolic certification of their products. The pedagogical function the institution performed for seventy years was a subordinate part of this cycle, not an autonomous cultural goal. Honest restoration requires the Academy to acknowledge its commercial nature openly: the institution exists because corporations founded it, and it continues to operate because corporate actors in the recording industry use it. This acknowledgment is the most radical in the five-level work. The acknowledgment of the genealogy (first level) concerns the founding act of 1957; it is a historical acknowledgment. The acknowledgment of the advertising nature (fifth level) concerns the institution's work today; it is a current acknowledgment about the present day. It puts in question the meaning of the institution's existence as a cultural, not an advertising, body. After such an acknowledgment the Academy would have to either redefine itself as an institution with autonomous cultural work (create a parallel pedagogical or educational component comparable in weight to AMPAS's Academy Museum) or accept its own identity as an overtly advertising institution, which would strip certification of its symbolic effect. This is a double bind with tactically impossible sides: preserving the commercial function requires undeclaredness; stepping out of undeclaredness requires a rebuilding of the institution.

The five levels are structurally linked. The first level (acknowledgment of the genealogy) opens up the possibility of levels 2–4. The fifth level (acknowledgment of the commercial nature) is what turns the first four into work leading to a real, not rhetorical, result: without acknowledging the commercial nature, all the preceding levels risk becoming a new round of undeclared work. The Academy could formally carry out levels 1–4 (acknowledge the genealogy, acknowledge the missed modernization, formulate an aesthetic criterion, restore representation) and leave the commercial nature untouched. In that case the new pedagogical function would become a more sophisticated advertising shell with an updated language. The fifth level blocks that scenario: it requires that the pedagogical side stop being subordinate to the commercial cycle. Without it, all the other levels remain cosmetic.

Such a trajectory is theoretically possible, but it requires a coalition of very narrow conditions. A leadership that did not participate in the 2018–2022 DEI reform. A willingness to distance itself from the constructed narrative of institutional bias without repeating the same gesture of self-criticism. A willingness to publicly acknowledge the 1957 genealogy with the understanding that this destroys the defensive architecture of constitutive undeclaredness. A willingness to formulate an aesthetic criterion in the knowledge that any formulation will be contested. A willingness to accept that a restored representation may be narrower in reach than the prior peer community (because competence verification narrows the electorate), and that this is fine if content is restored. And finally, a willingness to publicly acknowledge the commercial nature of the institution, with the understanding that this will rebuild the institution into a narrower autonomous cultural work or move it into a directly advertising mode without the symbolic effect.

The question is open. Can such a coalition arise over a five-to-ten-year horizon? The preconditions are not visible at the current moment. What external factor would have to emerge to make it possible? Candidates: a generational change in the Academy's leadership (natural, not forced); a deep legitimacy crisis that makes holding on to the old position impossible; the appearance of a competing institution with a declared pedagogical mandate (section VIII, scenario 1); external regulatory pressure demanding a substantive revision (scenario 2). None of these factors makes a four-level (or five-level) restoration inevitable. They only create conditions under which it becomes institutionally rational. The transition itself requires a concrete decision by concrete people at the Academy, and that decision remains an open question about the future.