You always need to adapt your art to the medium and provide contrast. To do otherwise is to argue against reality. Your average run-of-the-mill street performer is always going to get more attention than Joshua Bell will on the street.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

>As metro stations go, L'Enfant Plaza is more plebeian than most.

For something more serious, check out Weingarten's thought-provoking feature piece about dead children — "Fatal Distraction", http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2009-03-08/news/36840402_... . His story does a good job of (1) telling stories about tragic accidents where children were forgotten in the back of cars and died; (2) showing that the key factor in whether or not the parents were prosecuted was not the facts of the situation but instead which prosecutor's district the deaths occurred in; (3) finding a surprising explanation for the increase in these accidents — rear-facing car seats. Given the subject matter, it's neither smug nor glib, and so you might prefer it to his subway violin story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Enfant_Plaza_%28WMATA_stat...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Federal_Center,_Wash....

In other words: woosh.

I think you're going out of your way to sound sophisticated by pretending you "get it".

So even the commuters in a rush could tell that he was something.