The article states:"There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding."
Of those who stopped and listened, Mortensen is a project manager who "doesn't know classical music at all"; Furukawa is a demographer who "doesn't know much about classical music." either; Tindley, who buses in a restaurant, says "Most people, they play music; they don't feel it. Well, that man was feeling it. That man was moving. Moving into the sound." Picarello is a supervisor at the Postal Service who studied violin, and Olu is a public trust officer and also studied violin - so these two are already tuned in.
It doesn't actually confirm that the educational system and social constructs such as "good taste" may get in the way of forming a direct emotional connection to art, but the article points out: "But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch." If I recall correctly from my first year of art school, Royden Rabinowitch and the other instructors actually spent quite a lot of energy getting us to "unlearn" things and recapture the state of openness that children have. As the article says: "The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother's heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too". Not just music, I think.
Curator Mark Leithauser has "good taste" assumptions when he suggests: "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.'" But maybe the number of people who'd actually "get" that painting would be higher than he thinks? It might be in similar proportion to those who stopped to listen to Bell - which was akin to the subscription level of the TSO in relation to their potential audience; in other words about the same.
