Stop and hear the music… on the streets

On 2007, Joshua Bell, an Grammy Award-winning violinist was with a pair of jeans, a white t-shirt and a baseball cap playing at a metro station in Washington. No, it was not that he was not famous yet; in fact, he was playing with a $3.5 million dollars violin and had sold out the tickets of his concert later on that week (on which the cheapest one was around $100 USD). So, why did he stay for several hours playing to collect $32? Certainly it was not for the money; he was part of an experiment that Gene Weingarten, journalist for the Washington Post, decided to do. On this experiment he wanted to prove how people had their aesthetic criteria and sensibility absolutely dependent on a set of cultural parameters (like something beautiful should be on a museum, a theater or a concert hall). Incredible to see how we have lost our sensibility to appreciate the beauty around us…