Would you recognise beauty?

--amadeus--

If there was a Picasso original hanging in a second hand clothes shop would you recognize it? If a man in a pub was reading out a Shakespearean sonnet you hadn't heard before would you appreciate it?

Or do we only recognize "beauty" - and more specifically "art" - when it is placed in front of us in context?

I mean, if you had one of teh worlds most famous concert musicians playing some of the worlds most revered music on a multi million dollar Stradivarius in a subway station in the middle of Washington DC you'd need crash barriers to hold back the crowd!

Wouldn't you?

Well, not according to this:

A Most Interesting Story

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule. A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk. A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work.

The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.

This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of an social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be: If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?


Origins: Many a marketing survey has been conducted to gauge how presentation affects consumer perceptions of quality, and quite a few such surveys have found that people will frequently designate one of two identical items as being distinctly better than the other simply because it is packaged
or presented more attractively. Might this same concept apply to fields outside of consumer products, such as the arts? Would, for example, people distingush between a world-class instrumental virtuoso and an ordinary street musician if the only difference between them were the setting? These were questions tackled by Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten in 2007 when he enlisted renowned violinist Joshua Bell, a winner of the Avery Fisher Prize for outstanding achievement in classical music who regularly undertakes over 200 international engagements a year, to spend part of a morning playing incognito at the entrance to a Washington Metro station during a morning rush hour. Weingarten set up the event "as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?"

So, on 12 January 2007, morning commuters passing through the L'Enfant Plaza Station of the subway line in Washington, D.C. were, without publicity, treated to a free mini-concert performed by violin virtuoso Joshua Bell, who played for approximately 45 minutes, performing six classical pieces during that span on his handcrafted 1713 Stradivarius violin (for which Bell reportedly paid $3.5 million). As Weingarten described the crux of the experiment:
Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?
Three days earlier, Bell had played to a full house at Boston's Symphony Hall, where fairly good seats went for $100. But on this day he collected just $32.17 for his efforts, contributed by a mere 27 of 1,097 passing travelers. Only seven people stopped to listen, and just one of them recognized the performer.

The Washington Post won a Pulitzer in the feature writing category for Gene Weingarten's April 2007 story about this experiment.

From Snopes, you can get the full story (including video with audio) from the Washington Post here

silverharp

its a cute experiment and an interesting piece of performance art in its own right that could not be replicated in a concert setting. However the result was known before hand for obvious reasons.
when people pay to experience art they are also paying for some element of exclusivity so the actual arrangment of "atoms" or "waves" is not always the point.

--amadeus--

silverharp wrote: »

when people pay to experience art they are also paying for some element of exclusivity so the actual arrangment of "atoms" or "waves" is not always the point.

So "art" has no intrinsic value and we only know "beautiful" when it's presented to us in an appropriate setting?

silverharp

--amadeus-- wrote: »

So "art" has no intrinsic value and we only know "beautiful" when it's presented to us in an appropriate setting?

both , listening to a CD or buying a reproduction painting can generate the same/similar experience, this time you have cut away most of the appropriate setting. The only difference is that we are surrounded by images and sounds and we are not wired to observe or take in every "beautiful" image.
As I said before its a great piece of performance art which makes the point that we should stop and take time out from time to time to see whats around you.
Another angle is knowledge and appreciation which adds value to the art, I remember taking a tour of a castle with a bunch of architects once and it gave a whole extra dimension to what I would have observed with my untrained eye.


off topic but reminded me of a joke where an economist professor and his student are walking down the hall, the student says that he can see a $100 bill on the ground, the economist says dont be rediculous, if there was someone would have picked it up by now!

Joycey

I think ye are a bit off the mark here, as is the article.

Undoubtedly the context within which we view the piece affects our interpretation of (or non-engagement with) it. However there is something else happening here as well.

Im about a third of the way through a lecture series on how to listen to classical music. I can tell you that I had absolutely no idea what to appreciate in a Bach fugue before about an hour and a half ago (not that I have any more than the most basic idea now). I occasionally listened to them anyway before, but mainly only solo piano stuff and even that usually only when studying. Clearly the only value I was getting out of some of the most complex, intricate music ever made is as a decorative piece, to block out other, less appealing sounds in my environment.

The people who paid to get into the concert knew what they were getting, and are not at all representative of the people on the subway at rush hour, in all likelihood. The Bach is beautiful, but virtually meaningless except as a decorative work (and very possibly just boring noise) unless the hearer has the interpretative apparatus to actually appreciate its intricacy and beauty. Hence the result of the study.

silverharp wrote: »

when people pay to experience art they are also paying for some element of exclusivity so the actual arrangment of "atoms" or "waves" is not always the point.

Couldnt disagree more tbh. If you are paying for exclusivity then you are not paying to experience art. If an industry has been built upon the commercialisation of art and people buy into this rather than access to the art itself its unfortunate, but in that case they arent really paying to see the art (and why should they have to?).

silverharp

Joycey wrote: »

I
Couldnt disagree more tbh. If you are paying for exclusivity then you are not paying to experience art. If an industry has been built upon the commercialisation of art and people buy into this rather than access to the art itself its unfortunate, but in that case they arent really paying to see the art (and why should they have to?).

I'm not sure where you draw the line. If someone buys a Picasso original, person 2 buys a reproduction (assume all brush strokes copied perfectly) and person 3 goes to see the original if its lent to a gallary does it generate any useful observations? Why didnt person 3 just go to the shop where they sell the reproductions? Why didnt person 1 just buy a reproduction?
Music is different in that every live performance can be said to be unique and there is a difference between the local school orchestra and the same arrangement played by a professional orchestra (so here the arrangement of atoms and waves do matter). But just as important is the education and subjective preferences of the individual who experiences it. For instance one of my relations is a classically trained musician but he doesnt like Mozart. He will happily admit I'm sure that Mozart "objectively" was a great musician but there would be no judgement to be made if he passed a free performance of Mozart.

looksee

In everyday life it is easy to miss beauty. One person walking along a city street will see traffic, hordings, uninspiring buildings. Another will see new leaves unfurling on the occasional tree, cloud patterns, a silver seagull against a dark grey sky.
I work near a very run down bit of city, but there are interesting stone frames round doors and windows, an expanse of old slate cladding with an attractive texture, an old stone wall with tiny ferns and plants growing out of it, some old railings that tell a story if you stop and look. Possibly not beauty in a conventional sense, but if it is interesting, makes you stop and look, opens your mind and gives pleasure, then surely it is well on the way to being beautiful.

Joycey

silverharp wrote: »

I'm not sure where you draw the line. If someone buys a Picasso original, person 2 buys a reproduction (assume all brush strokes copied perfectly) and person 3 goes to see the original if its lent to a gallary does it generate any useful observations? Why didnt person 3 just go to the shop where they sell the reproductions? Why didnt person 1 just buy a reproduction?

Well if it really is an absolutely perfect replica, full size and everything, then IMO there is absolutely no reason for anybody to fork out more than the cost of the replica for the work, whats the point? The only reason as far as I can see for someone to pay millions for a Picasso original is that they can flaunt it as a way of intimidating/impressing people, hence not actually enjoying the work but buying social status in effect.

As far as going to see it in a gallery is concerned: its cheaper, you see many other works at the same time, there is contextualising and informative text around the works etc.

Many artists and aestheticians have written about the unsuitability of (or active damage done to the artwork done by) the museum/gallery setting. Removing the work from its original intended place in the world of the artist's culture (eg an Aztec dish, or a statue from a Renaissance church) may serve to detract from the full meaning the work would have had in its proper context. However this is kind of a different argument from the article in the OP

But just as important is the education and subjective preferences of the individual who experiences it. For instance one of my relations is a classically trained musician but he doesnt like Mozart. He will happily admit I'm sure that Mozart "objectively" was a great musician but there would be no judgement to be made if he passed a free performance of Mozart.

Right but presumably being a classically trained musician he has the interpretative apparatus necessary for determining that Mozart was indeed "objectively" great (whatever that means). This then allows him to make an informed aesthetic judgement which has to do with the relationship between his own taste and the matter of the work which becomes visible to him due to his training. Playing Bach to random people on a subway at rush hour will most likely not result in many people who are trained in listening to baroque music enough to recognise its phenomenal intricacy or beauty actually hearing it.

silverharp

came across this the other day from a BBC doc. its in parts on the subject of what is beauty


Philosopher Roger Scruton presents a provocative essay on the importance of beauty in the arts and in our lives, making a case for restoring it to the centre of our civilisation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65YpzZrwKI4

Pygmalion

What I dislike about a lot of people supposedly interested in Art, Poetry, Classical music is that they never seem to stop and think "Do I enjoy this work?", they seem to be of the opinion that if it's hanging on the wall somewhere, published in a book, or expensive to hear then it's good, whereas a brilliant piece of art will be looked down upon if it's not in the right setting or recommended by the right people.
Too many people seem to flaunt their taste in things like this as something of class or refinement, while actually not giving a **** about the work itself.

Obviously there are exceptions, unfortunately I'm not even sure if they constitute a majority, or even come close.

Joycey

Pygmalion wrote: »

What I dislike about a lot of people supposedly interested in Art, Poetry, Classical music is that they never seem to stop and think "Do I enjoy this work?", they seem to be of the opinion that if it's hanging on the wall somewhere, published in a book, or expensive to hear then it's good

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-9849949-39.html

That probably has something to do with it. This is exactly where the role of the "critic" (with all the pretensious connotations that word has unfortunately accumulated) comes into it IMO. Educated disseminators of what is sh1te and what is worthwhile are essential to a certain maintainance of quality in production of anything which can be loosely determined as falling under the category of the 'aesthetic'.

Probably not going to be useful to anyone but here is a techno blog which I see as fulfilling just this role: http://mnmlssg.blogspot.com/. They provide excellent information and sources for quality, 'avant-garde' techno. They have done absolute wonders for my musical education, helping me to disseminate, and providing plenty of examples of quality techno. There was actually an interesting discussion on there a while back of the loss to the electronic community of the neighbourhood record shop, where people could come and discuss and listen to quality music, under the knowledgable guidance of the music nerds who worked there. The overwhelming view in the comments section, which I would definitely subscribe to, is that it is just such blogs as these which now fulfill this role in the new digital context within which most techno listeners now acquire their music.

A quiet one

--amadeus-- wrote: »

Or do we only recognize "beauty" - and more specifically "art" - when it is placed in front of us in context?

I'll just throw this in. I have no training on the subject, but anyway;

Before being able to recognise "beauty", many people with failing eye-sight first have to put on their glasses.
In that same way, is setting aside time, such as those concert goers did to listen to the music, not a bit like having to put on glasses?

Wibbs

--amadeus-- wrote: »

Or do we only recognize "beauty" - and more specifically "art" - when it is placed in front of us in context?

Whatever about art or what has become much of art today, I would say most respond to beauty in a broad sense. Even from a biological one. Culture obviously has a big bearing on this, but there seems to be a beauty map, if even a simple one. Look at sexual beauty. Or specifically the notion of female beauty. It varies over time but some basic frameworks exist. Symmetry, hip waist ratio, flawless skin etc.

What is beauty though, in the larger sense? The beauty of a man or woman makes sense from the purely biological. The beauty of a Titian is harder to pin down(unless its one of his nudes:D). Maybe way back in the day we ascribed beauty to nature as it was advantageous to do so. Spring blossom on a tree was beautiful because it was a harbinger of warmer weather, the colours of ripe fruit etc. These notions built up in us and from basic templates extended into all areas of life. Maybe that was the difference between us and previous humans. The abstraction of beauty to the world in general.

As for art itself? I think today it has lost its way. There is much of it with little aesthetic value or skill involved. I've gone to a fair few exhibitions and galleries and it's rare I would see something and say "yes that's nice" or even "I may not like it but see why others might". Down to personal taste? Probably. Taste itself I have some issue with. We've gone from an over reliance on "good" taste to an over reliance on either "bad" or over intellectualised taste. Baby with the bathwater time. This goes massively for art IMHO.

Doozie

Isn't it about time someone said 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder?'. Sorry it had to be me.

I've had the 'what is art' discussion with a friend of mine when I told him I was taking art classes and he couldn't understand how you teach art or why I would go to learn it. He actually went to NCAD so his arguement was flawed, bless him.

The op's example of Joshua Bell raises other questions and should not, in my opinion, mean that people do not recognise art. It is unfair to judge people who are listening to headphones, rushing to a 9am meeting etc for not stopping to hear such beauty.

I think the arguement is how beauty, in this case music or art, is interepreted and the meaning making that ensues. One persons picasso is another person's coke advertisement. Our pretetermined knowledge shapes our interpretation. For some, if we are told that it is art, music, we like it. Does all art hang in a gallery or does all good music get played in a concert hall? That is what the op is trying to determine.

But I think it is indeterminable.

You cannot make a template for what beauty is or for how we can recognise it.

miec

The people who paid to get into the concert knew what they were getting, and are not at all representative of the people on the subway at rush hour, in all likelihood. The Bach is beautiful, but virtually meaningless except as a decorative work (and very possibly just boring noise) unless the hearer has the interpretative apparatus to actually appreciate its intricacy and beauty.

+ 1, an excellent point. I also think setting up the test with Joshua Bell in the subway was flawed as people rushing to work have their minds set on just getting to work and in a sense the results were predictable (maybe adds credence to the arguement that art / beauty is only added to by setting). However, the people who had time to listen did so, specifically the child was interested.

I have been lucky enough to see some beautiful works of art around the world and I am not sure if I am influenced by the hype but I know I responded to Van Gogh's work on a deep level. Yes I saw his 'starry night' in books, thought it was lovely but to see the actual painting, well it did something for me, it stirred emotions, sensations that I cannot define or explain. I believe beauty has that effect. I know right now the snow is a pain, but, when I take a walk and see the frozen canal where I live besides, the snow on the trees, the mistiness of the sky, it all looks so beautiful and I get that same feeling of awe and wow type feeling. I think there is an element of subjectivity to beauty but I think all the great works of art, music, writing etc have a core beauty that inspires awe and that something else in greater numbers than other more mediocre works.

humbert

Judging by the videos on the Washington Post page the acoustics in that place are atrocious. All the tiles rattle the sound around the room.

The experiment is still valid but the piece would sounds a lot better in a concert hall.

TheCardHolder

Perception is a tough cookie to understand. Having just taken my exam in social science perspective on marketing today and having wrote 8 pages on perceptual selectivity I am in no mood to write anything more on the matter for the moment.
But it's a very interesting article.

Doozie

TheCardHolder wrote: »

Perception is a tough cookie to understand. Having just taken my exam in social science perspective on marketing today and having wrote 8 pages on perceptual selectivity I am in no mood to write anything more on the matter for the moment.
But it's a very interesting article.

Ah go on.
For the craic.

silverharp

partially related to the thread



How Music 'Moves' Us: Listeners' Brains Second-Guess the Composer


ScienceDaily (Jan. 16, 2010) — Have you ever accidentally pulled your headphone socket out while listening to music? What happens when the music stops? Psychologists believe that our brains continuously predict what is going to happen next in a piece of music. So, when the music stops, your brain may still have expectations about what should happen next.



A new paper published in NeuroImage predicts that these expectations should be different for people with different musical experience and sheds light on the brain mechanisms involved.



Research by Marcus Pearce Geraint Wiggins, Joydeep Bhattacharya and their colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London has shown that expectations are likely to be based on learning through experience with music. Music has a grammar, which, like language, consists of rules that specify which notes can follow which other notes in a piece of music. According to Pearce: "the question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others."



The researchers asked 40 people to listen to hymn melodies (without lyrics) and state how expected or unexpected they found particular notes. They simulated a human mind listening to music with two computational models. The first model uses hard-wired rules to predict the next note in a melody. The second model learns through experience of real music which notes tend to follow others, statistically speaking, and uses this knowledge to predict the next note.



The results showed that the statistical model predicts the listeners' expectations better than the rule-based model. It also turned out that expectations were higher for musicians than for non-musicians and for familiar melodies -- which also suggests that experience has a strong effect on musical predictions.



In a second experiment, the researchers examined the brain waves of a further 20 people while they listened to the same hymn melodies. Although in this experiment the participants were not explicitly informed about the locations of the expected and unexpected notes, their brain waves in responses to these notes differed markedly. Typically, the timing and location of the brain wave patterns in response to unexpected notes suggested that they stimulate responses that synchronise different brain areas associated with processing emotion and movement. On these results, Bhattacharya commented, "… as if music indeed 'moves' us!"



These findings may help scientists to understand why we listen to music. "It is thought that composers deliberately confirm and violate listeners' expectations in order to communicate emotion and aesthetic meaning," said Pearce. Understanding how the brain generates expectations could illuminate our experience of emotion and meaning when we listen to music. (2)



Story Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100115204704.htm

studiorat

I posted about this already, I'm currently reading Musicophillia by Oliver Sacks. It's a book of anecdotes relating to people who develop strange mental relationships with music while suffering from various neurologicay disorders.

The grammar of music is a cultural thing in the same way as language. There's a very interesting experiment the singer Bobby Mc Ferrin does at a science fair in canada. He shows people a simple 3 note phrase from the pentatonic scale and then conducts them through the rest of the scale without having told anybody what he is about to do. Thus showing that there is anticipation in musical grammar as there is in language.

There is also some very interesting work starting this year in the UK regarding music and complexity. Asking questions like why do we like simple or complex rhythms or melody...

PhiliousPhogg

If you play a guitar or piano chord you play a number of musically interconnected notes. If you play each note slowly in sequence, the more trained your ear is the easier you will recognise that the notes are related and create a harmony.

The more trained you are musically the more you can appreciate. There is of course also an element of natural understanding of music, it is one of 7 (I think) different types of intelligence along with mathematical, emotional, literary and a few others I can’t remember, but you can develop that musical intelligence by training your ear.

I myself make efforts to listen through and identify with pieces of music I find difficulty with, and for the most part nothing comes of it to be honest. But I’ve come to see the rewards of challenging yourself to appreciate intricate music and when you find a piece that touches you differently to any other piece you’ve ever heard, it’s a very unique kind of high that only music can achieve over performance and visual art.

However people generally won’t recognise a groundbreaking masterpiece at a premiere or bach in a subway because they’re not in tune (pun intended) with the intentions of the performer/composer. Had they been familiarised with what they would be introduced to, they would surely react more positively.

Put it this way, the purpose of that experiment could also have been carried out by getting people to listen to a piece of upbeat folk music and then some Bach and then asking them which piece they preferred. I wouldn’t be surprised if the upbeat folk music came out on top simply because of it’s mood and because the Bach piece would have too many complexities for an unprepared listener to appreciate.

I think that it’s a good thing that great art is showered in complexity and detail, and having the knowledge or skill to identify with what the artist is portraying makes it all the more enriching an experience.

That said it’s also sad how artists become self indulgent and reclusive because they explore their feelings to such an indepth level that they are unable to relate to others anymore. A key to art is to keep it simple and clever so that it can reach out to the audience.

BumbleB

Music is really hit or miss ,Something thats visual is far more powerful.


At any one moment hundreds of things are going on all around you and because of that you have a filtering system that "filters " all percievably "useless " repetitive stimuli.

For example teens effectively filter out persons above the age of 22 or younger as "old" therefore they would operate in a world in which the "old" people do not exist really ,but they will notice if one walks in front of them. This is called the reticular activating system ,its designed to prevent sensory overload '

These filters are not not just confined to teens , Even single Girls filter out about most of the guys they would come across on a given day.

Only people whose RAS is tuned into music ,would have even noticed the musician.














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