No Myth, No Music – from Joshua Bell to Igor Fokin and his Puppet Doo Doo

I found this unbelievable story on Jeff Pulver’s blog. Gene Weingarten is credited with the idea for the stunt, he wrote about it in Washington Post and NPR did a piece on it last year:

“Virtuoso concert violinist Joshua Bell [Wikipedia] plays more than 200 international bookings a year. But in January, he found himself performing during rush hour for morning commuters at a metro station in Washington, D.C. During the 40 minutes he played, Bell says only seven people stopped to listen – and only one person recognized him. He earned $59 – if you include the $20 the woman who recognized him left.”

This reminded me about my conversation with Hugh Macleod in the comments to his post Art, Myth and Marketing. Hugh wrote:

“The way artists market themselves is by having a great story, by having a “Myth”. Telling anecdotal stories about Warhol, Pollack, Basquiat, Van Gogh is both (A) fun and (B) has a mythical dimension… if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have had movies made about them. The art feeds the myth. The myth feeds the art.”

The Joshua Bell story also reminded me about the late Igor Fokin. He was a regular street performer puppeteer on Harvard Square in the early 90s. I was working on Harvard Square in the early 90s and occasionally would strike a conversation with Igor in Russian. Igor was to puppets what Joshua is to violins. He deserved a bigger stage than the streets of Cambridge. Years later while walking in the square I discovered this monument in shock. Not many people actually notice the cast puppet. It is mounted on one of the vehicular bollards in front of the One Brattle Square building. The cast inscriptions are placed amongst the pavement bricks:

In Memory of beloved puppeteer Igor Fokin 1960-1996. And in celebration of all street performers. Igor Fokin’s puppet Doo Doo was recreated and design by sculptor Konstantin Simun …Dedicated in 2001.

I always have this nagging feeling that Igor’s death was not natural (I don’t know). As Hugh MacLeod wrote “the art feeds the myth – the myth feeds the art”. Often there is no art but myth that feeds aplenty and often there is art but no myth or myth comes when there is no one to feed.

Tagged as: art, boston, hugh macleod, marketing, music, myth, russia, sculpture, vincent van gogh