[MD] Joshua Bell piece in the Washington Post

[Ben Golden]

I briefly used this forum about a year ago, but eventually left for reasons 
I'm not going to go into here.

I recently came across an interesting piece in the Washington Post, where 
they had renowned violin soloist Joshua Bell play in a subway station in DC 
and observed people's reactions.  With a couple exceptions, no one paid him 
any attention.  The piece is at 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

As I read the article I couldn't help but run some MOQ analysis.  What's 
interesting is that Pirsig seemed highly non-elitist with regard to 
observations of quality.  He relied upon individuals, rather than experts, 
to determine what had high quality.  Thus there seems a clear contradiction; 
Bell is considered a top-notch performer, yet individuals don't detect the 
high quality of his performance.  I'd offer the following questions:

1) Does the high quality of Bell's performance come from the social value of 
his celebrity?  That is, are his listeners enjoying his performance not 
because it sounds any different from a worse performer, but because experts 
have given him social credibility?

2) Does the quality of classical music come from a dated social value, which 
says that it's high art?  Did people at some point decide that classical 
music was high quality without reference, for various reasons, to other 
types of music, such as jazz, techno, or Cuban folk music?

Ben Golden

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