Pearls before swine

You may have already heard of it...
Washington, D.C., downtown (offices). It's around 8:00 a.m. on Friday, January 12th. A young-looking white man dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap stands in a busy subway station, takes a violin out of its case, places it in front of him in the classic beggarly pose, and begins to play J.S. Bach's Chaconne.
And he plays it beautifully, because he is Joshua Bell, one of the most acclaimed contemporary violinists, and his instrument is a $3.5 million Stradivarius.
In total, he plays six pieces, for about an hour. Then he collects the money and leaves. The scene is filmed by hidden cameras. This is an experiment devised by the Washington Post (3 excerpts from the video on washingtonpost.com, UPDATE: the video is now also on YouTube, scroll down the page).

In that hour, 1,097 people pass by, mostly office workers of various levels. Maybe there's even someone who paid $100 to hear him at Boston's Symphony Hall just three days earlier.
Only seven stop to listen for more than a minute. 27 people leave him coins, for a total of $32. Only one person recognizes him.

Watching the video, you'll have noticed that the acoustics aren't too bad, and you can clearly tell he's not just anyone.
So?
Personally, I certainly wouldn't have recognized Joshua Bell, but I would have stopped and given him a few bucks. I say this because it happened to me with a cellist on the St. Petersburg subway. He played too good. I stopped to find out he was a member of the state orchestra whose salary hadn't been paid for two months.
So let's assume those 27 people who gave him something thought, "How good!" I'd love to stay, but I'll be late for work."
And the other 1,070? Let's assume another 70 or so thought the same thing, even if they didn't give him anything. That still leaves a thousand.
Note that this was one of the most acclaimed living violinists, playing some of the greatest masterpieces ever written on one of the finest instruments ever built. Stendhal syndrome stuff.
It follows that, if no one is capable of noticing it, we evidently have a significant cultural problem.

Does our society fail to educate people to recognize and appreciate beauty?
Or does it force us to ignore what's around us?
Or should we reopen the age-old epistemological debate about what beauty is?

What do you think?

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