Virtuoso Violinist Plays in DC Metro Station

[dlgood]

I thought alleynyc would find this particularly interesting...

Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

By Gene Weingarten
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007; Page W10

Joshua Bell is one of the world's greatest violinists. His instrument of choice is a multimillion-dollar Stradivarius. If he played for spare change, incognito, outside a D.C. Metro station, would anyone notice?

Click to read the article

Comments

[dlgood.livejournal.com]

I'm copying from one of her posters, because I think SawLady completely missed the point:

I think many of you are misrepresenting the article. I didn’t get a sense of the passers-by being judged by the writer, or the musician. And critiquing Bell’s busking abilities seems to miss the point. The point, as it seems to me, is that people don’t look for beauty in everyday places; that, placed out of context, few will notice it. Leithauser’s (the curator at the National Gallery) makes the same point with reference to an artwork, removed from its frame.

So, maybe some of you are annoyed by the article because you’re evaluating the wrong part of it. It’s not that he’s a good or bad busker, or that the writer is trying to play a trick on commuters, or anything else other than that we rarely recognise the beauty in everyday events when it’s out of context.