[MD] Joshua Bell piece in the Washington Post

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Ian]
it's the cultural context of the "performance", whatever peoples 
actual "tastes" for a given musical genre.

[Arlo]
Yeah, spot on, Ian. I think you actually read into my post something 
I wish I had said, or meant to say, so thanks.

There was a book on art I read a while back (can't recall the title, 
will ponder on it) that lamented the "traditional" view of the 
art-experience as "isolated" between a subject and the particular 
object. But "art" takes into account a whole host on contextual cues 
that surround both the traditional "viewer" and "object". Case in 
point, the hustle and bustle of the subway. What this points at is an 
"art-experience" that includes the subject and object but also the 
"ground" onto which the experience occurs.

A painting hanging in a museum is not a simple "art object" suspended 
in isolation awaiting an unsuspecting subject. The museum itself 
provides a whole host of contextual cues, from Khaled's pointing out 
of "validation" (if its hanging in a museum, it MUST be good), to the 
anticipation and expectation of the experience carried through echoey 
wooden floors, and quiet hushed talk to spotlighting and museum 
guards. A symphony, or a rock concert, also provides a rich context 
(or I should say "meaning-laden" context) with which the experience 
unfolds; from subjective expectation to lighting to 
accoustic-amplification to the very dress and manners of the people 
around you (sitting, dancing, moving, formal, informal, etc). For 
example, if I were in a room with a swing-band playing, and no one 
was dancing, I'd likely be cued to see the experience (and hence the 
music) as "low quality". The context defies my expectations for the 
value of swing. But place that same band in a room of zoot-suite 
wearing wolves and dolled-up foxes, and the music takes on a whole 
new persona. In short, we should strive to see "art" as an experience 
not just between some object and a subject, but as an experience "in 
context"... and importantly "in motion".

Have you ever been in a pub and heard a song and thought 
"Brilliant!!", and then got home and played the song and it just 
wasn't the same? Part of it Pirsig describes as the movement from 
Dynamic to static quality, but I think part of it too has to do with 
a shift in the context the experience was imbedded within. I've been 
to the symphony and the music (ahh... "experience"!) transcended 
anything I have ever felt listening to the same songs on CD, even 
with Bose surround speakers.

Education (learning new "languages") can make us more appreciative of 
new and different symbol systems, as you correctly point out. But you 
are right again in saying that this exposure is not about "what's 
good and what's not", but about increasing our range of 
high-quality/DQ-filled experiences. Don't teach which painting is 
"good" and which is "bad", but teach me about the language of 
painting, so that I can listen to paintings on my own in the hopes 
that one will take me outside of this static world.

"And what is written well and what is written badly...need we ask 
Lysias or any other poet or orator who ever wrote or will write 
either a political or other work, in meter or out of meter, poet or 
prose writer, to teach us this?" (ZMM)

And what is good, Phaedrus, and what is not good...need we ask anyone 
to tell us these things?