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bogdan » life lessons #1: context matters

08:59 pm on Dec 5, 2012 | read the article | tags: life lessons

Joshua Bell, after playing his $3.5 million Strad, at l’Enfant subway station in Whashington DC:

When you play for ticket-holders,” Bell explains, “you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence …

In the same WP article, Mark Leithauser, a senior curator at the National Gallery explained:

Let’s say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It’s a $5 million painting. And it’s one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: ‘Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.’

(source: The Washington Post, April 8th, 2007)