Context is validation is value

How important is context to the value of content? A recent experiment by the Washington Post shows us that it can make the difference between $1000 for a minute's work and $32.17 for three quarters of an hour.

Violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, whose recent performance at Boston's Symphony Hall commanded prices of $100 a ticket, was asked to play as a busker for 45 minutes in a rush-hour Washington subway station. Almost everyone ignored him. Perhaps half a dozen people paid any serious attention. One recognised him. He made thirty-two dollars.

Mark Leithauser, a senior curator at the National Gallery, explains:

"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.'"

What does the Post's Joshua Bell experiment tell us? That context can be vastly more important than content (a point the Post already thoroughly understands with its two-way content syndication, of course). That Dick Dale's advice for musicians not to sign with labels misses the crucial point of how, therefore, musicians will establish themselves as credible in the eyes of mass audiences. But perhaps most of all that to complete the experiment and see where exactly the balance of power lies between the content creator (musician) and distribution gateway (concert hall or subway station) WaPo should book a talentless hack into Carnegie Hall and see how the tickets sell. Or perhaps - since it is after all a newspaper - publish a few articles that it knows are absolutely dreadful and see if the critical and popular response to those pieces is measurably different.

HT: my friend Helen, who exhibits her excellent paintings at her website Wax&Wane.

Update: interestingly, Galen H Brown's interpretation of the experiment takes a familiar theme - that content is so abundant and attention so scarce

"...why be late for work to hear a violinist in a lousy acoustic space playing music I can hear on the radio even if from the few moments I hear as I approach he sounds like he’s probably pretty good?  I live in a society so rich with art that I can afford to miss this opportunity and get my art someplace more convenient."

If it was a rare treat to hear even the world's greatest violinist play in a subway, people should pay attention. But, Brown again:

"Consider also the fact that most of the classical music that people hear consists of recordings of professional musicians, and many of them have heard recordings of Bell himself although they probably don’t know it.  Hearing music played at a skill level approximate to what you are accustomed to is not surprising or attention-grabbing." Indeed. Mass replication of music performances makes the opportunity to hear the world's best performers commonplace, not exceptional.