is life only worthwhile behind a paywall?
there was a man playing a bandoneon1 on the subway yesterday. i was headed to the movie theater, only three or four stops away but i considered staying on longer to watch this busker and forego the $10 movie ticket to see Paul Thomas Anderson's latest2.
this man, the one playing the bandoneon, was very apparently a practiced musician. i think perhaps that he began learning when he was a small child, maybe by watching his grandfather play, memorizing the movements of his fingertips and the bouncing of his knees. the music he played was traditional to the Argentine tango genre, a big part of the tourism industry here in Buenos Aires.
a few weeks ago, i saw a man and a woman dancing tango in a square next to the Feria de San Telmo3. some stuck around to watch the free performance and yet many others continued walking, perhaps turning their heads for a glance, but more likely not. a popular tango café for tourists here in Buenos Aires is Café de Los Angelitos, where attendees pay upwards of $85USD a head for drinks and a show, more if they want food or better seats.
i will not make the argument that you should not pay to see live performances or art, but i have been left wondering why there seems to be more value placed in artistic talent when it exists behind a paywall. why do people not make eye contact with the man playing the bandoneon on the subway, whose music they'd pay $100 to hear if it were on a stage? why do we continue walking when a couple dances on the street? why is the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes relatively empty on a weekend despite being free and hosting Monets and Rembrandts, whose paintings themselves are worth millions?
the same argument can be extended to online writing: does my writing matter less because it's free? would it be worth more if i charged per article, or for a monthly fee like those on Substack or at the NYT? is art only worthwhile if there's an exchange invovled?
maybe it’s about context. maybe we expect art to live in certain places and when it shows up elsewhere, we don’t know its value, and therefore its valueless. we assume if it were actually good, it wouldn’t be here - it would cost something.
but that’s a kind of self-fulfilling blindness, isn’t it? if we don’t look, we don’t see, and if we don’t see, we don’t have to question the systems that tell us what’s worth our attention, and what’s not.
still, i wonder: if i’d stayed on the subway, listened to the man's whole set, and dropped a bill into his cup, would that have made it more valuable? or would it have only made me feel better?