Grammy-winning violinist Joshua Bell plays in the DC Metro:
Meg Wolitzer draws a distinction between talent and success:
Soon the 1980s morphed into the 1990s, and somewhere along the way God gave us the internet, which promised to connect previously undiscovered talent with the world at large. Sure, there are the occasional phenomena, those YouTube sensations who burst out of nowhere and reach millions of viewers, or who gather “hits” – an appropriate word, since the image of a hand lazily slapping at a keyboard seems a good way to describe how we choose our cultural intake. But the problem with the rise of internet culture, along with the 24-hour news cycle, is that the furnace constantly needed to be stoked. There had to be a constant stream of people, faces, personalities standing by to fill up all that time. And so individuals who ordinarily wouldn’t have been in the public eye were suddenly drafted for the job. “Celebrity chef”, “brilliant hairstylist”, the terminology reflecting an aching wish, or need, for widespread specialness – acknowledged, of course, by fame. Even at home, my kids would demand, “Mom, can you make your famous mac and cheese?” How easy then to become a star, an expert, a source of acclaim. Everyone had talent.
In fact, though, very few actually do. …
It’s not talent that’s brought to the fore most often these days, but success. Whether it’s Joshua Bell playing masterfully to a swirl of indifferent commuters, or a brilliant film that gets a bad review and barely makes a dent in anyone’s consciousness, talent in its pure, beautiful form can be overlooked or misunderstood. Meanwhile, success – which by nature is bottomless, fathomless, and therefore keeps even successful people constantly on the hunt for it – keeps getting the attention. The two continue to be spoken of interchangeably, when in truth the first is the real deal, and the latter is simply the fairy dust that sometimes gets sprinkled on the real deal, and other times gets puzzlingly sprinkled on the mediocre, or the fraudulent, or the happened-to-be-there-at-the-right-time.
The Dish 