Very little, apparently.
You know, I find the tone of the piece infuriating. It is the worst kind of elitist horse shit. The article spends its time being shocked...shocked!...that people in the subway wouldn't take note of the great violin master playing before them. Dizzied by this revelation, they seek solace in the high-minded explanations of Hume and Kant.
What snobs! Why is it so surprising that context is so important? Is it really so shocking that there isn't an inherent worth in the artist's performance independent of venue? Can you not wrap your elitist little heads around the fact that when you pay $100 per seat at the music hall, you're paying just as much for the experience of paying $100 to listen to a musician respected by people you want to be respected by as you are paying to listen to the musician him/herself? Do you really not understand that it's a social exercise and a ritual of your class more than it's the "pinnacle" of music in some supernaturally objective way?
I've never seen any difference between people going to a classical music concert and people going to a Dave Matthews Band or even a Korn concert. Beauty really is in the ear of the beholder. Art is equivalent to entertainment, and the enjoyment of the audience is the _only_ thing that matters. To believe the things you enjoy are fundamentally better in some arbitrarily defined way is arrogance of the highest order. Most of the time what you mean is the _kind of people_ who enjoy a particular kind of art are somehow inferior rather than the art itself is inferior, and it should be obvious that that is just another means for one group of people to differentiate and judge another group.
So you know what? The next time you accost someone for not "appreciating" classical, or jazz, or opera, remember that you're no different from that red state neanderthal railing against "east-coast" liberals. You're both just judging people you don't know because they're not like you.
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2 comments:
I don't think the writer was being snobish. I think the article says alot about our lives. We are so busy or focused or afraid of being scammed, we can't even take a second to see (or hear) what is going on around us. The story made me sad for what we have lost. Maybe in the future I can try to take an extra second to experience what is going on around me. Isn't this what art is all about?
I don't think it says anything about our lives that we don't stop and listen to music (or appreciate art in general) in a place that is quintessentially about having a time constraint. Isn't making a train one of the more fundamental metaphors for a deadline (since the train leaves without you if you miss it, and thus is very all-or-nothing)?
Add that to the fact that some people don't really like classical music (myself included), and some people don't want to hear loud music where they don't have a choice of whether to hear it or not (especially when such an unprompted performer is implicitly asking for money), and I think you have all kinds of reasons to expect any artist to be ignored. Wander around Seattle, San Francisco, London, Cambridge, or just about anywhere else during good weather and you will see a plethora of street performers who have no shortage of loitering audience members.
At best, it's an unfit metaphor for "our busy, artless modern lives," which itself has become rather a worn cliche.
Even if the point were valid, why the choice of such a "high artist"? Why choose such a particularly inaccessible art form? Why not the world's best juggler? Is it perhaps because such a spectacle might actually draw the kind of crowds and attention the article desperately wants to lament the absence of? Is it because it might show the whole premise of the article to be the ridiculous exercise that it is?
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