[this was written before your update]

Kriston, of all articles to opine on, I am surprised you chose this article. It was my favorite article in the Washington Post last year, ahead of even an internationally syndicated article about myself. The article goes to the very root of what you write about: the appreciation arts in society.

Going after the gimmick is to miss the larger message of the story: the article clearly shows how unappreciative people can be toward the arts. If your band was playing in that space and people were ignoring you, would you not feel annoyed? Or would you, as you state above, dismiss people's attitudes because they are late for work and you are playing in the wrong venue? Blame it on the time & location not the audience, right? I disagree. The appreciation for the arts does not end when one is late for work or where someone happens to be at. Many people were too lazy to remove their iPod's earbuds-- they did not want to be bothered-- even by the sounds of a million-dollar violin. The article touches on a larger social issue that few articles in recent years have been able to capture so well.

You also fail to appreciate that the article went beyond the traditional means for print journalism and included a multimedia component that further illustrated how people can just pass by some of the best art in the world and not realize it. With the death of investigative journalism on the television, this article was able to transfer very well to print/web dimensions. Without the video component the article would have been merely above average, but the combination of being able to hear Bell play and see people not even notice him or his music, is why the article was so well appreciated.

Essentially, conducting a successful social experiment, capturing it on video, and being able to humanize the alienation, contempt, ignorance, and hope of a commuting population in a well-written article is deserving of a Pulitzer. It pushed the bounds of what contemporary journalism can be and I hope it challenges you as a freelance journalist to think outside of the boombox.

No, I agree. It was a petty gotcha game and not terribly enlightening. Are you joking about the Pulitzer?

Now maybe it doesn't deserve a pult'zer prize pop, but Weingarten has poked Washington right in the sleepy-filled eye. To say that no cultural act could get a rise before your coffee is suspect.

If Mary Coble was stripping duct tape off Blake Gopnik's breasts in the middle of rush hour every fed would stop and feel a pang. Even if it was just on their nipple.

I think this is what Kriston is getting at Nikolas:

"Many people were too lazy to remove their iPod's earbuds-- they did not want to be bothered-- even by the sounds of a million-dollar violin."

How could they hear the violin if they are listening to an iPod? If they saw the performer, should they be able to recognize him as world renowned based on his technique? Should they recognize the million dollar violin? This is assuming they even looked up. So how many people simply didn't hear/see him?

So this accounts for those who listen to music in the morning. What about the people who are simply still tired and don't care what's going on around them? Most people probably can't tell the difference between a pro violinist and someone who is simply competent. At any time of day in any setting.

This experiment was bogus. It was an entertaining read and video, but certainly not informative.

I think it's remarkable how strong the backlash was (and is!) to this article. Almost as remarkable as the number of otherwise cynical people moved to tears as they realized something important about how they live their lives.

Anecdotes are often the journalistic lead-in to cultural analysis, and they usually are not subjected to criticism on the level of statistical pedantry.

Thinking about how friends reacted to this article when I showed it to them (those that reacted positively anyway), the connections made by this article were not scientific (i.e. facts) but emotional (i.e. truth). But I cannot recall any anti-Weingarten critics address anything beyond the obvious fact that neither Weingarten nor Bell know the first thing about busking. So, Kriston: Is it false?

Is what false?

The setup was novel, but obviously flawed, and not the stuff to try to wring deep, universal judgments out of, as Weingarten attempted. That just made it annoying.

Top that off with the fact that it was about 2,000 words too long and entirely over-wrought, and it's amazing it received the Pulitzer. It's kind of an insult to actual, solid feature writing, really.

Then again, I think most of Weingarten's writing amounts to maybe three wry observations fluffed up with graf after graf of total bullshit.

Weingarten was really canny in picking the morning rush hour in a very government job heavy location - I'd imagine the crowd would have been different at many of the downtown stops or in the evening anywhere. It would have been a more interesting social experiment to compare two different stops or two different times than just to do it once in a way that was set up to support Weingarten's thesis.

I'd like to see a followup feature lamenting how nobody visits all the priceless works of art at the National Gallery during the morning rush hour.

Weingarten's cheap bit of fluff was inferior to David Maraniss' piece on the Virginia Tech shootings that it's hard to believe both ran in the same newspaper.

so inferior. Sheesh.

Gabriel: David Maraniss's piece did net him a Pulitzer also, so good work was recognized.

Brian: Sure—I'd bet that if you installed Duccio's Madonna and Child in a prominent place in the same Metro stop, you'd get the same results. A Metro station is as bad a venue for showing art as it is for hosting music. If people are so disinterested in seeing it, why did the Met pay $45–50 million for it?

Same thing with Joshua Bell: I'm not sure what the problem is supposed to be. "Three days before he appeared at the Metro station," Weingarten tells us, "Bell had filled the house at Boston's stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100." Bell's performances are so in demand that they cost more than almost any other sort of ticket you can buy, including sports games and rock concerts.

It's a weighted experiment designed to confirm his bias, one that's shared by half the nation's critics—the pessimistic half. I think the people who sympathize with this view—or with Roberta Smith's handwringing over the decline of visual literacy in the culture is endangered—are just going to nod in vigorous agreement.

But it's pretty clear in other contexts that people will pay vast amounts of money for these experiences.

this particular experiment is definitely flawed (the results would have been different with a more leisurely/less cranky metro crowd), but i think your point on money feeds into Weingarten's premise in an even more cynical way -- the dc commuter crowd that's willing to pay hundreds of dollars to see this violinist in a context with social cache won't give five minutes for the same music when no one's watching. i suspect he'd say they're not paying for the art but for the meaning behind being able to dress up, drop cash on a dinner, and then sit in a dark concert hall for two hours with other educated, wealthy folks.

That is a great point, and I think you can take it further to show that what I'm saying informs a cynical reading. I emphasized money because that's one way to prove that people value art (they'll pay a lot for it). But for some people, it's not a choice between $40 Wizards tickets and $150 Bell tickets, a choice made on a budget. I'd bet that it's more true than not for most of Bell's audience that $150 for tickets is not that much money. If an audience member doesn't value $150 then you can say that the high ticket price is merely to ensure that the right sort of company gathers (and the wrong sort are excluded).

That depends on some really cynical assumptions about the audience and, yeah, I'm cynical enough to say you're right.

We know that the people taking public transportation aren't those people, right? ("Take the yacht, darling, it's so much faster than switching over at Metro Center.") So you'd expect that finally, given a chance (for free!), any regular Joe relish the opportunity—unless people truly are inured to art and only care about it when they have the money to turn art into a social filter.

Well . . . I think DCeiver's right about art and context. "[W]hen you remove a violin virtuoso from a concert hall and stick him in a Metro station, the nature and the value of the art changes. Weingarten (and Schiller) seem to think that absolute talent should impress absolutely."

At best I think the experiment is inconclusive because a 10-second snippet of a musical piece heard in noisy, acoustically dreadful circumstances is not necessarily going to be transplendent even though the performance, when done properly, really is transportive.

But the class point is a very good point, and though I don't believe Weingarten's experiment proves it I can't say I wouldn't be surprised. Changing the context changes the aesthetic value and, yeah, it surely changes the social value as well.

My personal reaction to the Weingarten piece was, "So, what did you expect?"

My reaction had nothing to do with the time of day during which the stunt was staged, but with the fact that anyone would be surprised that an overwhelming majority of Americans--from any city--would not recognize a world-class violinist even if the violinist came up and jabbed his bow in their eye. There is a reason why it's called 'classical' and not 'popular' music.

I personally enjoy listening to classical music. WETA radio in DC is one of my top three stations to listen to. I would probably have enjoyed the music as I was rushing to my day, but I wouldn't have known the violinist from Adam.

Now, had Dave Matthews been performing there, I'm pretty sure that I would have recognized him.

A lot of music blogs—or anyway, IIRC, both Dial "M" and Kyle Gann's blog—had similar thoughts to yours, Kriston, and your reaction doesn't make you grumpy, but if it's exceptional, it does make the majority of readers idiots, because the points you make should really have been obvious.

Almost as remarkable as the number of otherwise cynical people moved to tears as they realized something important about how they live their lives.

You see? Idiots!