The author analyses the process of evaluating works of art in media texts and highlights the main stages of this process. The author proposes a methodology for analyzing speech forms of journalistic representation of a work of art based on the achievements of modern Russian intentional stylistics. Using examples of literary critical texts devoted to the novel «Lavr» by Evgeny Vodolazkin, whose publication became an event for the media art discourse, the author explores special features of the formation of value judgments at each stage of critical evaluation. The analytical technique developed by the author is applied to texts brought to the recepient through various channels of mass communication: published in the quality newspaper Vedomosti, and the TV channel Russia-Kultura. The author concludes that media texts of the analyzed type demonstrate a gradual, stage-by-stage unfolding of artistic evaluation, which is reflected in the language forms of journalistic works. This structure of evaluation reflects a change in the object of evaluation.