Art in Unexpected Places - a commentary on "Pearls Before Breakfast"
"Pearls Before Breakfast" is an article from the Washington Post's April 8th issue. It can be found here, on the Washington Post's website.
The article was about an on-the-street concert featuring the world-renowned virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell. Mr. Bell, a child prodigy, is now 39, and is considered to be one of the finest violinists in the entire world. His instrument? A 1713 Stradivarius, preserved in extraordinary condition - it still has its original coat of varnish, considered to be part of the reason the instrument sounds so extraordinary. The location? L'Enfant Station in Washington, D.C. The objective? To see if people will recognize genius when it is found in an unexpected place.
Bell played for nearly an hour, posing as a mendicant street musician, while a hidden camera looked on.Around 1,097 people walked through the area where Bell was playing in the 43 minutes he was there. Only seven of them stopped to listen for more than a minute. Twenty-seven threw money into Bell's violin case, netting him a mere $32 during his stint L'Enfant Station, compared to the $1,000 per minute he can command when playing concerts around the world.
I find it simply amazing that anyone could ignore him as he played. Watching some of the camera footage of the experiment, you could hear the violin filling the arcade with sound. Yet most people, when asked if they had heard anyone playing, said they couldn't even remember seeing a violinist.
It seems, that in the context of a busy subway station, most people simply filtered out the music like so much noise. Some scientists have suggested that the human mind can only process one sense at a time, virutually ignoring all the others while concentrating on, for example, looking for arrival and departure times, or talking on a cell phone.
Some of the few people that stopped were relatively unimpressed by Bell's playing. One, a D.C. lawyer, confessed that she wasn't even listening to the music, but rather analyzing his situation in the same way she would spend the rest of her day analyzing cases. One that was impressed, however, was three-year-old Evan Parker. He repeatedly tried to return to listen to Bell playing, while his mother dragged him off to preschool before she went off to work. In fact, every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and listen, only to be pulled onwards by a rushed parent.
The only time there was more than one person playing at any one time was near the end of Bell's performance. Two different people stopped, one, John Picarello, for a whole 9 minutes, waiting while Bell finished the piece he was playing. Interestingly enough, both of them had studied violin when they were younger. Picarello had even considered making it his living.
What does this tell us about beauty and art? That you are made more aware of the art in any theater after having participated in it? Why did the children all want to stop and listen? Perhaps they simply had less to think about. Or maybe the mind of a child is more open?
This article raised some very interesting questions for myself, and I am glad I got a chance to share it with you.
~Grant