Joshua Bell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw

So this was actually something that I saw on my news feed on Facebook and I thought it was really interesting and applied to the class.  There was a snapshot of the video in the link that I posted above and the following article was beside the photo:

"A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that 1,100 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by, and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace, and stopped for a few seconds, and then hurried up to meet his schedule.

A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping, and continued to walk.

A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried, but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally, the mother pushed hard, and the child continued to walk, turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money, but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this, but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the most talented musicians in the world. He had just played one of the most intricate pieces ever written, on a violin worth $3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston where the seats averaged $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste, and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?"

 I just thought this was worth blogging about and it could make for a very interesting class discussion, because it is a really good question: what other things are we missing?  Joshua Bell is a great musician, and barely anyone paid him mind in the subway.  How much fantastic art is all around us and we are just ignoring it?

Second Dewey Question

Can “pieces of art”, even if they were not originally intended to be so, be greater appreciated as time continues to go forward?  Or will it eventually lose all aesthetic pleasure?


Many arts and crafts have endured the test of time and have remained to be considered great pieces of art to us nowadays.  Caveman paintings are still looked at with great fascination and interest, and, in my opinion, will probably continue to until the end of the human race.  This goes for all other great pieces of art and crafts and architecture from the past.  The Parthenon, Stonehenge, all these pieces of history are seen as art, and it is because they are part of history that they will endure.


Years from now, like a hundred years (if we still exist), I believe that humans will look at cave paintings and still find them as fascinating and interesting, if not more, than we do now.  This is because they are a part of our human history, taking us back to when we were our most primitive.  It was be absolutely foolish not to revere these pieces of art, to ignore them is to ignore us as humans and where we came from.  If we can view them as our history through art, then that is the best that we can do, and from this, aesthetic pleasure will endure in these objects and in our history.

First Dewey Question

Can living things, such as plants, flowers, trees, etc. be considered living pieces of art, even though it is commonly believed they cannot possess the sincerity it takes to make true art?


If we go by Dewey's/Tolstoy's belief that true art requires sincerity from the artist, then it is a very difficult question to answer.  Do plants make themselves beautiful colors or present themselves as beauty for gratification from other plants and other non-plant entities?  How could we even prove such a thing?


Well, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the plants aren't intending to be living pieces of art, but they do intend to be attractive to the eye.  Flowers are bright and attractive colors to attract insects to help them pollinate and reproduce, so in this sense they are intending to be beautiful.  However, does this mean that they are intending to evoke aesthetic pleasure in the viewer?


That is a different question all together.  In this case, it seems that plants aren't trying to communicate a feeling that they are having, especially since it is up to debate whether or not plants actually have feelings.  And if they do, do plants have the capacity to interpret their feelings and somehow morph their appearance to express them?  Somehow, I doubt it.


In my opinion, what humans call "living pieces of art" such as certain types of flora is a purely human thing.  We like to assign beauty and meaning to things which originally didn't have them until we came along.  So, my answer to this question would be only to humans, because we make them that way in our minds.

Nicole's Question on Dewey

Capitalism, unfortunately, has a negative affect on art.  It makes it so art, especially classical art, is presented in a way of financial value rather than aesthetic value.  People now put a price on art that they shouldn't.  Instead of looking at art for the representation of emotion or the statement that it is trying to make, most people look at art simply for the visual quality and then assign a price to it.  Aesthetics may then be claimed to be taken into account, when in reality it is all just a formality to assign price.

Because of this degrading affect capitalism has had on art, it makes the general populace take art less seriously.  People no longer appreciate art for its aesthetic value (or, at least, a good portion of people don't).  Artists are given the stereotype of people those snobbish, stuck-up men in art galleries, taking with an air of superiority and looking to have their art put into a high class museum; no one takes it seriously and they look at it with contempt, seeing artists as people just looking for money.  Art as a means of expression is not taken with much seriousness, and those people that are recognized as doing such art "starving artists", meaning they are not getting by well because they are not doing art for money.

Alas, there doesn't seem to be much of a solution to this issue.  People could be reinforced of art's purpose to be expression of human emotions and issues and using art to communicate these feelings among the populace, but that can only get you so far.  As long as there are greedy people within the confines of capitalism, they will keep assigning price to everything and anything, art included.  The best that we, as artists, can do is to try to transcend this view, keep doing what we're doing, and hope that our word gets out.