Once upon a time I followed a path of links from one website to another and I stumbled upon an article in Washington Post. And I read it. I am not a very sensitive person (well, I am a man) but this article stirred a flurry of emotions in my heart. I cannot say that I dropped a tear but I was really deeply touched.

The article was not about the latest news (which are always bad and to which we are already numb) but about art and beauty. And what it means for us, humans. You can read the full text on Washington Post website but here is the condensed version.

Gene Weingarten, cultishly popular Washington Post journalist, has convinced world famous violinist Joshua Bell to conduct an experiment. On Friday morning, January 12 Joshua Bell put on some casual clothes and a baseball cap and showed up at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in the center of federal Washington. There he stood against the wall beside the trash basket, opened the case at his feet, shrewdly threw in some pocket change as a seed money, took his four million dollars Stradivarius violin and began to play. He started with Bach’s “Chaconne” which Joshua himself calls “not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history.” After “Chaconne” followed Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and more and more…

Joshua’s Stradivarius was making out-of-this-world sounds which make even gray-hair men in packed concert halls cry. “Delicate urgency.” “Masterful intimacy.” “Unfailingly exquisite.” “A musical summit.” “. . . will make your heart thump and weep at the same time.” That is just a few critical acclaims to Joshua Bell’s latest album, “The Voice of the Violin”. So, you get the picture. The Washington Post was anticipating crowd control, traffic jams, police and tear gas. Not so fast…

The whole experiment was videotaped with a hidden camera and these are the cold facts: the performance lasted 43 minutes, the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by, 37 of them gave money, most of them on the run for a total of $32.17, only 5 slowed down to listen to the music and only one recognized Joshua. You can see the whole misery of ignorance for yourself in this video:

It is a very gloomy and disturbing picture. It makes you angry and sad to you see all these people passing by totally oblivious to the beauty of the sound they hear. Federal employees on their way to the boredom of their government jobs.

The title of Weingarten’s article reads “Pearls Before Breakfast”. The hidden message reverberates with proverb adapted from a saying of Jesus from the Gospels, “Cast not pearls before swine.” The full text from Matthew 7:6 sounds even more callous: “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”

On the other hand, you keep asking yourself: would you have stopped in the same situation? Would you? Would I have stopped? Early morning, barely awake, late for work, making a mad dash to the gray warmth of your cubicle, feeling being utterly alone in a crowd, pounded with mechanical noise of the city… You close in and ignore your surroundings. Maybe…

But at the same time there were a lot of people there who did not rush anywhere. Just across Joshua and his violin there was “shoeshine stand and a busy kiosk that sells newspapers, lottery tickets and a wall full of magazines with titles such as Mammazons and Girls of Barely Legal.” There were people standing and waiting in a lottery line looking for a long shot to get a lucky break. Just in a few feet from a treasure which they ignored. What do you make of that?..

What Gene himself has to say about his experiment? “Context matters” - he says - “Kant in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment argued that one’s ability to appreciate beauty is related to one’s ability to make moral judgments. But there was a caveat. Paul Guyer of the University of Pennsylvania, one of America’s most prominent Kantian scholars, says the 18th-century German philosopher felt that to properly appreciate beauty, the viewing conditions must be optimal.”

“Optimal,” Guyer said, “doesn’t mean heading to work, focusing on your report to the boss, maybe your shoes don’t fit right.”

And that applies not only to music, but all arts including visual art.

Mark Leithauser is a senior curator at the National Gallery, he oversees the framing of the paintings. Leithauser thinks he has some idea of what happened at that metro station.

“Let’s say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It’s a $5 million painting. And it’s one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: ‘Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.’”

Optimal viewing conditions, art in a frame, in a gallery, in a museum… Art labeled as “art”. By artist himself or even better by critics and art establishment… Doesn’t it lead us to the conclusion that art is a pure social construct? Art without frame: is it art?