Let me be the millionth person to link to the Washington Post article about the busking virtuoso. Let me also agree with Kevin Drum about the reasons nobody listened:
Plus, of course, IT WAS A METRO STATION. People needed to get to work on time so their bosses wouldn’t yell at them. Weingarten mentions this, with appropriately high-toned references to Kant and Hume, but somehow seems to think that, in the end, this really shouldn’t matter much. There should have been throngs of culture lovers surrounding Bell anyway. It’s as if he normally lives on Mars and dropped by Earth for a few minutes to do some research for a sixth-grade anthropology project.
A couple of additional comments about this: One is that I think there’s a subtle element of economic class in Weingarten’s piece. His disappointment that more people didn’t stop to listen is probably at least partly due to an unspoken assumption that the people passing through the Metro station are, like him, salaried employees who aren’t going to get in much trouble if their day slips a few minutes in one direction or another. In fact, a lot of those people are probably hourly staff, who really do get in a world of trouble if they clock in a few minutes late. It’s easy to forget that there’s a real divide there– insert apropriate clips of John Edwards stump speeches here.
The other thing about this is that it would’ve been trivial to avoid this problem. Had they done the experiment during the evening rush hour, things would likely have been very different. People on their way home from work aren’t under the same constraints as people on their way to work– there are still constraints, but a few minutes one way or another aren’t as big a deal, most of the time. I would guess that the chance of drawing a crowd, or at least getting people to slow down and listen, would be substantially better at 5 pm than 8 am.
This is, of course, a question that could probably be answered easily, if anybody knows of a blog by a subway busker…