Would beauty transcend

I went to the ENGAGE conference on the weekend up at Katoomba. I was particularly encouraged by the talks from Justin Moffatt, which were based on the hymn "Come thou Fount of Every Blessing". There's much I could write about the talks, but today I am just going to blog about one of his illustrations. In the first talk, titled "Tune My Heart to Sing Thy Grace" he made reference to a newspaper article from the Washington post, in which an experiment was set up to answer the question: "In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?". It's old news in America (from April's paper) and has been blogged to death up there, but for this experiment they had Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, play some of the world's greatest classical music on a Stradivari violin, worth 3.5 million dollars, in a metro station in Washington DC. I couldn't resist going away and looking for the article, curiously called "Pearls Before Breakfast" describing what happened. It's long, but it's a good read (touching also on the old epistemological debate of whether beauty needs an audience to be beauty, and the idea that perhaps art needs a frame to be appreciated, and the question of what beauty is - just for interest's sake). Here's an excerpt:

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he's really bad? What if he's really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?

On that Friday in January, those private questions would be answered in an unusually public way. No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities -- as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?

The conference was based on work, and Justin was making the point that Jesus and the gospel is like Joshua Bell playing his Stradivari ... And it's a crying shame to take no notice.