we see what we expect to see

[jrtom]

and totally fail to recognize genius when it's somewhere that we don't expect to find it:

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

Wow.

(from lethran, I think)

Comments

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

I think that was exactly the reaction they wrote that article for. I also think it's wrong.

I don't have time to explain myself in depth right now, but let me quote a couple of other people.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I agree with a comment on one of those links that they make the assumption that everyone will be stopped by the power of classical music. I wonder if the results would've been different for similarly skilled musicians in other genres.

Growing up in NYC, there was a Chinese man I often saw at Grand Central, playing a classical Chinese instrument - I don't know the name of it, it had one string and a long neck and a small round resonance chamber at the bottom. I always thought it was interesting to listen to, and when he was in the station I'd wait for my train somewhat near him. Then one day I was waiting with a friend of mine who played violin in some NYC orchestra and she told me he was a professional violinist. I got the impression from her that he was doing it for his own enjoyment and to spread the audience for classical Chinese music, not for the money.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

My post was pretty brief (trying to clear a backlog) so I didn't express myself as well as I could.

I'm not claiming, by any means, that this was a "pearls before swine" thing here. In fact I suspect that traffic through L'Enfant Plaza (one of the major DC Metro interchanges) is likely to be about as musically sophisticated as one could hope for from a random crowd not actually at a concert hall, in the US at least.

I think that mainly what was going on was a combination of two things, and it's my impression that this was the main message of the article (the title notwithstanding--as someone mentioned, the writer doesn't necessarily get to pick the title):

(1) People are often in a hurry--perhaps more than they really need to be. The more of a hurry you're in, the less you notice what's going on around you.
(2) People in the US generally expect buskers to be people who are a couple of steps above panhandlers: they're only doing this job because they can't get something that pays better, and are generally not really competent musicians. This is perception is not omnipresent, even in the US--there are places in which buskers are known to be competent professionals--but I suspect that it's a common assumption in most places. And I believe that it's been repeatedly demonstrated, that one's perceptions are significantly informed by one's expectations. So while lots of people probably noticed the violinist, the default assumption was probably "oh, yeah, another one of _those_ guys that can't play but wants my money anyway", and so didn't notice that he was in fact very good.

As a side note, I bet he would have done a lot better (in terms of both income and explicit attention) if he'd been wearing a tuxedo. Again, it's about managing (and influencing) expectations.

In any case, while I think that this experiment does have some interesting things to say about our culture, I don't think that it's "we have no appreciation for classical music". I think it's more like "we're often in too much of a hurry" and "we don't hear live music in public very often" (and possibly "we really don't know how to deal with people asking for donations", but that's a whole dissertation by itself). The rest, as I see it, is pretty much a known fact of human psychology.