Joshua Bell: no ordinary busker

Joshua Bell: one of the world's great instrumental soloists. Photograph: Linda Nylind

Those Carling Live miniature spots are the bane of so many commuters' lives in London: little semi-circles of doom that you have to somehow avoid in the daily crush of the rush hour, in order to escape the orbit of whichever over-enthusiastic busker is trying to compete for your change, belting out a rendition of Streets of London or O Sole Mio, artfully arranged for congo and kazoo, delivered with an ear-splitting intensity that makes a day in the drudgery of an office seem like a completely sane way to spend the majority of your waking life.

But how would you feel if the musician you just passed swiftly by was not, in fact, a serial auditioner for Pop Idol or, at best, a jobbing music student trying to supplement their beer money, but one of the world's great instrumental soloists? Earlier this year, that's exactly what happened on the Washington Metro system. Unsuspecting commuters were treated to a virtuoso performance from a guy in a baseball cap and unassuming T-shirt. Book-ending his 43-minute set with a towering account of one of the peaks of the solo violin repertoire - Bach's D minor Chaconne - this was no ordinary busker, but Joshua Bell, doyen of the international music scene, whose film-star looks and high-octane performances reduce classical music audiences to raptures wherever he plays.

So what was the reaction of the commuters? You might have imagined a crowd would develop - "Hey, this guy's good!", "I don't mind being late for work to listen to this!", or "Man, I didn't think the violin could sound like that!" - and, in the Richard Curtis remake, Bell would make the whole station come to a standstill, causing a spontaneous multiple epiphany as people realised the hollowness of their pathetic, materialistic lives and their spirits awoke up to a world of transcendent beauty.

Alas, that's precisely what didn't happen. Out of 1097 people who passed him (the Washington Post counted every one of them), a grand total of seven - yes, seven, without any zeros - stopped to listen for more than a minute to him. He earned US$32 and a few cents, not enough to get a ticket to most of Bell's gigs.

The lesson: clearly, Bell's busking experience proves the pervasive philistinism of a society that has lost its soul along with its ability to take time out and just listen, and reveals the decrepitude of our taste and discrimination to a nadir when we can't even recognise beauty when it's there, right in front of our faces. Or is it? You could use this as a stick to beat western society, but the exercise - really a stunt, which Bell conceived over a cup of coffee with a Post journalist - actually proves the power of context to create perceptions of artistic quality and even the artistic experience per se. Would you appreciate or even notice a Turner watercolour if it was stuffed in the corner of a restaurant you were eating in? Or stop to watch a great Godard movie if it came on one of those screens in Piccadilly Circus? And if you didn't, does that make those experiences anything less than great art?

Concerts are turned into unforgettable experiences by a communal act of listening, the magical and illusory creation of an oasis of silence in which the music can speak. That's why concert halls are designed to make us silent, to force our attention on to the stage, the performer. And we're quiet for bad performers just as we are for legendary ones, for a mediocre performance by a third-rate orchestra or for a titanic interpretation by the Vienna Phil - just as we're islands of grumpiness and get-me-out-of-here-ness when we're on the tube. The surprise, to be honest, is that anyone at all stopped to listen to Joshua Bell at L'Enfant Plaza that Friday morning. I'm not sure I would stop to hear Nigel Kennedy, say, playing at the bottom of the Leicester Square escalators in the middle of the Friday morning commute. Would you?