Is there any value to the world's most beautiful music when it is played by a busker at a subway station?

I read an article featured in the Washington Post a few days ago. It was an older article, written in 2007, but this was the first time I had come across it. The Washington Post decided to conduct a social experiment.  The basic of idea of it was they wanted to see what would happen when one of the world’s finest musicians performed as a street musician at a busy bus station in D.C.  Would anyone notice what they were hearing? Would people stop and pay attention? How much money would he make?  To conduct the experiment they recruited the help of the most brilliantly renowned violin player in recent history, Joshua Bell.  For about an hour he stood in the bus station, incognito style, playing some of the most beautiful y dramatic music ever heard by man, on a violin that was three hundred years old and worth more $3.5 million dollars. The surprising thing, hardly anyone noticed that he was there.  Out of the one thousand people that passed him only seven of them stopped to take note.  At the end of the day he made about $32. This is a man, a few days earlier who sold out Boston’s Symphony Hall for a minimum of $100 a seat (and that was just for the crappy seats). Typically, his talents earn him about $1000 per minute.

My point is that this is all a lesson in perceived value.  It is not as though the music he was playing at the bus station was any less beautiful or played with any less passion than he normally plays with.  But the context in which he was playing it in, as a busker at a bus station, created less value because he was perceived as just an ordinary street musician playing ordinary unrecognizable music and not as the grandeur master violin player that in reality Joshua Bell actually is. The people passing by had no idea of what they were hearing because they were hearing it out of context.  It was the context that created the lack of value for them.  Had they known that they were being exposed to some of the greatest music performed by the greatest musician in the world, it would have been more likely to have been perceived as such.  A lot more than seven people would have stopped to listen.

I wonder if I would have stopped and listened.  I would like to think that I would have, but I doubt I would. I’m usually too preoccupied with my own affairs to notice such beauty when I’m not looking for it. This makes me sad.

Here is a link to the full article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html