Art

Have you ever found yourself in an art museum looking at some very famous artist's work, thinking to yourself, "Hey, that looks just like the crayon-on-construction-paper my 3-year-old made that's taped to the refrigerator!"? Turns out that art isn't art unless you're told it is. At least that's the moral of an experiment done by the Washington Post wherein Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, played his $3.5 million Stradivarius violin in a Washington subway station. Out of the thousand commuters who passed by, it was thought 75-100 would actually stop and listen. Only 7 did, and only two of them thought anything particularly special about the performance. But if you took these same thousand people, placed them in a concert hall with $100 admission tickets, they'd surely think the music was absolutely phenomenal.

Similarly, if you take a million-dollar painting out of its frame, walk it two blocks down the street from the museum it resides in, and place it in a cafe's collection of $100 paintings for sale, it's unlikely anyone would buy it. Clearly, we are trained to admire art, but only if we know, from someone else, that we should be admiring the art.

So the question is who gets to decide what's worth admiring?