The famous violinist Joshua Bell once played in a DC metro station for nearly an hour. He played six Bach pieces (some of the hardest ever composed) on a $3.5MM violin. Over a thousand people rushed by, unperturbed. He made $32 and some change.
I still don't know how this makes me feel. You can say it's human to ignore things on the street, but there were more children who stopped than adults.
I think it's moreso that the older we get, the less we trust our emotions. We're scared to have an original opinion, or go against the grain. We let the responsibilities of life take over-- it's easier than reflecting on who you are and how things feel. We don't want to get in trouble, don't want to be late for work, don't want people to laugh at us, don't want to feel alone.
I wish I knew how to fix this in the world. I think we're missing out on a lot.
This is a great piece of writing, but before you take too much of a lesson in human nature realize this was also in a commuter station at 8am on a work day. Even if people had wanted to stop, they had somewhere to be.
I've seen musicians on the level of a talented high schooler draw a big crowd and rake in cash at chinatown a few stops away. If Bell had done that experiment in Dupont Circle at 6pm on a Saturday night he'd have probably started a riot =).
I think your assessment that grown-ups ignore fascinating things, because we have a filter that only lets us see the mundane, is spot on. This is probably unfixable. In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels, he gives this phenomenon a straightforward personification — whenever the character Death enter the real world, he gets lots of attention from children and cats, but is invisible to grown-ups.
I've often seen people say that one of the great things about having kids is getting an opportunity to see the world through their "everything is interesting" perspective. So there's an option…
BTW, my favorite part about Gene Weingarten's Pulitzer Prize-winning Joshua Bell subway busking experiment is that after he won the prize, someone noticed that this experiment had also been performed in 1930 with similar results — see http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-06-29/opinions/36873... .
In the context of a street performance, the difference between a bad musician and a good musician is much greater than that between a good and a world-class one, particularly if you're only briefly exposed to it. For the most part, you're just not focusing on the music - it's not like sitting in a hall intending to be entertained.
Should people at a metro station even be able to tell the difference between a violin worth $3.5k and one worth $3.5M anyway?
Another conclusion you could draw is that when you remove the hype Banksy's work just isn't very compelling (anymore, or perhaps just on canvas). Or perhaps this is evidence of the opposite: a fair number of people were willing to pay $60 for a small monochrome, hastily-sprayed stencil piece.
When it comes to street art/graffiti, the context is just as, if not more, important than the art itself. For example, massive roller paintings on the sides of buildings or pieces on trains are interesting partially because of the danger involved in putting up the work in the first place. When the context is removed and it's just put on a piece of canvas, it loses a lot of its significance. It's a similar reason why some feel that paid murals aren't true graff since then it's not really street art, it's just art on the street.
This. part pf street art is the 'vandalism' aspect. in banksy's case there is almost always an ironic play on this. in others, we've seen thinkgs in the uk like using "powerwashers" to do grafitii, as a relief of light (clean) against normal (dirty). oh, and this selective washing was "illegal", and deemed "vandalism" even though by most sane standards washing a wall (however selective) would seem in the public interest. But the marking of the wall (claiming it as your own) is the inherent social transgression...sad statement on our modern world. Yes, and none of this gets communicated with the same techniques ex-situ.
In this case, not sad at all. As abat says above, these pieces look flat and boring. Usually Banksy's work melds with the environment it's in, often in clever ways. Taken out of that environment, it's just stencil art. The special essence has left, and it does become boring.
