Beauty is in the Eye of the Contextual Beholder

I think it is funny how pretentious "serious" art is. Presumably great art is great because its beauty is intrinsic and there for everybody to appreciate. But a lot of "serious" art doesn't speak to ordinary people. Instead of seeing this as a problem, the art world treats this as a validation of just how wonderfully "serious" the art is since it isn't sullied by appreciation by those lower beings who obviously don't "get it".

The following video show an example of taking a world class painter, Luc Tuymans, and putting his art on the street to see the public "reaction". I love the quote by Amy Cappellazzo, head of Contemporary Art for Christie's, in the following video (at time 3:40): "... art is usually defined by the intention to be a work of art and the context in which you see it..."



So no longer is it "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" or "beauty is concrete". Nope. Beauty only appears in the "right" context. If you take pigeon droppings and put it on a pedestal it is art, but if you see it on the street we are required to be contemptuous of its "vulgarity". Hmm...

Well, is that just a problem for the the visual arts? What about the musical arts?

Here's a Washington Post article about world-class violinist trying his hand at busking in the street (if you go to the web site you can watch video clips of the performance). Serious music lovers predict that he will be mobbed by admirers:

Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?

"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."

So, a crowd would gather?

"Oh, yes."

And how much will he make?

"About $150."

Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.

"How'd I do?"

We'll tell you in a minute.

"Well, who was the musician?"

Joshua Bell.

"NO!!!"

A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station, Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements.

...

As it happens, exactly one person recognized Bell, and she didn't arrive until near the very end. For Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, there was no doubt. She doesn't know much about classical music, but she had been in the audience three weeks earlier, at Bell's free concert at the Library of Congress. And here he was, the international virtuoso, sawing away, begging for money. She had no idea what the heck was going on, but whatever it was, she wasn't about to miss it. ...

When it was over, Furukawa introduced herself to Bell, and tossed in a twenty. Not counting that -- it was tainted by recognition -- the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies.

"Actually," Bell said with a laugh, "that's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent."

OK, now I'm going to show that I'm a cultural slob. Personally I think art is out of contact with the public. That's OK for the really avant garde stuff, but "serious" art needs to keep one foot in the public arena doing publicly accessible art. I don't say that because I'm anti-elitist, but because I believe that memorable art is a cultural expression and you lose the heart of the art when an elite detaches itself from the broader public. We live in a world of private art. Really dynamic culturally rich societies support and relish a public art. Because our art has big ticket prices, people here are convinced we have really "fine" fine art. I dunno. I think the big bucks are a bubble like tulips in Holland in the early 17th century, or the real estate bubble at the beginning of this century.