An Interesting Article

http://www.conspiracycards.com/music.htm

I’ve chosen the article about an experiment conducted at a metro station in Washington DC. It’s interesting for me to know opinions of my classmates about this experiment and its results and that’s why I’ve decided to share this link with them. Within the bounds of this experiment, organized by the Washington Post, Joshua Bell, one of the finest violinists in the world, played some compositions of Bach. It was a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. Joshua Bell played incognito; nobody knew that it was one of the famous musicians in the world, whose ticket price per seat is about $100 and who was playing on one of the expensive violins in the world, which cost about $3,5 million dollars. More than a thousand people entered the Metro station where Bell was playing classical masterpieces, but only a few people stopped to listen to him. Some dropped money in his open violin case, but most of them even didn’t stop to look. The one person who paid more attention was a three-year-old boy, who stopped and listened to the violinist until he was hurried up by his mother.

This social experiment brought out a lot of discussions, opinions and debates. I’ve also discussed this experiment with my friends and are divided in our opinions. One of the points of this experiment is that we assign different value to art depending on the context in which it is presented. A lot of marketing surveys have been conducted to measure how presentation affects consumers’ perceptions of quality and these surveys have found that people frequently pay more attention to one of two identical items which is packaged or presented more attractively. And may be this concept can be applied in case of art also - between a world-class instrumental virtuoso and an ordinary street musician…