In January, Joshua Bell, a renowned violinist, spent forty-five minutes of his morning busking at L'Enfant Plaza in Washington, DC. A recent Washington Post article describes his reception by DC commuters, many of whom walked by without a glance. The article has sparked many interesting observations and discussions on the relation between context, meaning and value in art. Even my favorite NYC busker, Natalia Paruz (aka The Saw Lady), weighed in. The Post article speculates that the general disinterest of the passers-by is not due to a failure to appreciate good art but rather that our perception, reception and appreciation of art has much to do with context. On the whole, this does seem to be the case. It's interesting to watch those videos of Bell playing at a metro station and to observe the number of children who hang back for a moment to take in another glance. It made me think of a something a professor recently said to me: "students learn what they are not supposed to know." In other words, we learn through the years to discriminate and judge not only the things that surround us, but also our ability and capacity to understand what is unfamiliar. A few years ago, a friend asked me to read a poem and tell him if it was any good. He refused to reveal the name of the author. I read the poem in a state of panic. "I don't know," I said. "I don't know if it's any good." Without a context, without a way of positioning the author in a critical tradition, I felt completely lost. Context is our comfort zone, our security blanket. To be "taken out of context" is largely a negative condition. It is "out of context" that things get mangled, distorted, mistranslated. But the terrain of "in context" hazards its own risks--a distrust of one's own perceptions, that quicksand of "what we are not supposed to know"
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