"...eye of the beholder..." yadda yadda.

It's true though, beauty can be subjective. I remember my first year of college. Bon Jovi was coming to town and we were gonna get tickets! So, we set up camp in front of the Ticketmaster outlet the day before to ensure we'd be first in line when the box office opened the next morning.

Well, the Ticketmaster box office nearest us (for the Edmontonians) was the Jubilee Auditorium, which is also where the symphony would play (this was long before the Winspear Centre was built so I'm kinda dating myself here), as well as operas, ballets, and other stage performances.

So here we were, a bunch of uni kids, dressed in 90s "grunge" sitting on the pavement with our blankets and sleeping bags, studying from our textbooks, chatting, eating pizza, listening to music from someone's portable player... Little did we realize that there was a concert at the auditorium that evening.

Before long, all sorts of well-dressed people, shirts, ties, evening gowns were going into the theatre. That wasn't so much fun as when the show let out and everyone was leaving, many people walked by where we were camped out in front of the building. Some people just glanced over and walked on by, others pretended to not see us, look away, or walk in another direction. We even got a busload of Japanese tourists stop to take some photos before they hopped on their tour bus and took off.

The most fun was talking to the people who actually did stop to ask us what we were doing there and why were camped out in front of the theatre.... Most of the time, people just got a reply in unison: "Bon Jovi tickets!!!!"

One older lady, having asked her query, just shook her head and muttered: "I'm not even going to embarrass myself by asking who Bon Jovi is..."

I laughed! How could anyone not know a performing artist who had millions of fans the world over. Neither did I forget it, though. Much the same way, of all the people who walked by Joshua Bell playing in front of the metro, unless they were really into classical music, would also be clueless who he was. To most of the people he was just a busker playing a fiddle. Is that a sad reflection on today's society and what we value in the realm of the arts? No, not really. But context is everything. Maybe if you had placed Bell in front of the fine arts/performing arts/music faculty building at a university you might get the desired reaction. Much the same way, if Bon Jovi took a stroll through an art museum, we might also be surprised how few people recognized him.