Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten won the Pulitzer Prize this week, for a feature piece on a stunt he planned with concert violinist Joshua Bell. On one morning in January 2007, Bell took his Stradivarius to L'Enfant Plaza, one of the major transfer stops on the Metro (subway), and played for about an hour during rush hour.

Sure, the article was well-written, but the entire piece struck me as uncomfortably elitist, and classist in its elitism. Weingarten seems almost self-aware about that when he writes, "Let's accept that we can't look at what happened on January 12 and make any judgment whatever about people's sophistication or their ability to appreciate beauty." But Weingarten's underlying tone (distant, but not objectively so) suggests that that is exactly what he is doing.

Weingarten and his confederates seemed to expect crowds of commuters to surround Bell to listen. And of course they didn't. Weingarten himself notes that Bell regularly plays for audiences where the median price per ticket is $100 -- who, exactly, did the Post expect to recognize the violinist? Anybody of any class can appreciate classical music, certainly; but like so many of the arts -- ballet, opera, even theatre -- classical music is not a regular part of most people's lives. The "fine arts" are simply not mass entertainments -- largely, I think, because (a) the price of going to live events is prohibitive for all but the most enthusiastic, and (b) the scarcity of arts education (and therefore arts exposure) means that we are not creating potentially enthusiastic audiences. I bet that people would have stopped if Chris Brown was singing, because his brand of entertainment is widely available and therefore more immediately relevant to a much larger group of people. And there's no objective reasoning that can legitimately value Bell's performances over Brown's.

Further, a weekday morning is not necessarily the best testing ground for this type of experiment. A working man or woman, a parent with a child -- these people don't have ten minutes at 7:45am to pay attention to what a busker is doing in their subway system. Not when school starts at 8 and work starts at 9.

I like the idea that Weingarten eventually dances around: Our lives are not structured so that we are able to, or so that we choose to, take time to appreciate the many forms of beauty in our lives. We need to slooooow doooooown; I agree. But let's not pretend that a solo violin performance on a busy morning is the best sample from which to extract a universal hierarchy of values. I am inclined to reject a perspective that considers what should be important in people's lives without considering what IS important in people's lives.

(Another note: Weingarten -- or the copy editor at the Post, whatever -- titled the article, "Pearls Before Breakfast." As in Matthew 7:6: "...neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." I get the play on words. But I don't like the implications.)