The Washington Post ran a very interesting experiment where it asked award-winning violinist Joshua Bell to play his USD 3.5M Stradivarius in a Washington, DC metro station. Not many people recognized or even acknowledged the genius as they were too busy getting to work. What really made me think is this quote by Mark Leithauser, a senior curator at the National Gallery who “has held in his hands more great works of art than any King or Pope or Medici ever did”:
“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.’”
Do you think Art has an intrinsic value or is it only Art when it’s framed in context?
Posted in Art
