ABSTRACT
At 7:51 am on Friday, January 12, 2007, a man wearing jeans, a long-sleeve T-shirt, and a Washington Nationals baseball cap began to play his violin at the L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington DC. Over the next 43 minutes, 1097 people passed him by. Among them, only seven stopped to listen for at least a minute. Twenty-seven gave him money, most without breaking their pace, for a grand total of $32 and change. Only one person, who gave the man $20—more than half of what he earned—realized that the “fiddler” was Joshua Bell, one of the world’s most celebrated musicians, who had just played six timeless pieces of music on a violin handcrafted by Stradivari in 1713 and worth an estimated US$3.5 million. Two days earlier, Bell had performed at a theater in Boston where merely “pretty good” seats sold for $100. This study, organized by The Washington Post (Weingarten, 2007), poignantly illustrates the importance of context on subjective valuation. As Weingarten put it, “He [Bell] was, in short, art without a frame.” The Bell demonstration, of course, was not designed to carefully disentangle the possible causal determinants of people’s ostensible indifference toward beauty in a mundane environment, but rather to conjure in our minds the idea that, in two disparate contexts, the same man playing the same music on the same exquisite instrument could be valued and treated so differently.
