Rational Philosophy

How do we value things?

Armed robbers stole a Van Gogh, a Monet, a Degas and a Cezanne valued at $163 million from a private art collection in Zurich, Switzerland. In what was perhaps the biggest (in financial value) and boldest (in broad daylight) heists of its kind, the art thieves apparently selected the paintings because they had been hung next to one another, leaving behind more valuable works of art. Experts speculated that the added weight of glass frames dissuaded the thieves from taking more.

For Lukas Gloor, the museum’s director, it felt like losing “family.” For the collection’s owner, or his insurance company, one can surmise that apart from anything else it felt like losing $163 million. For the robbers, it no doubt felt like winning the lottery. But what of the potential, underground purchaser of the four paintings?

Any purchaser would have to be wealthy. I expect that he or she would also value the stolen paintings for their artistry (otherwise why purchase them?) And the purchaser, unable to put them on public display, would have to relish his or her ownership in relative obscurity.

This brings us to a point of some philosophic importance: Intrinsic and extrinsic value. When we have vast wealth, the intrinsic value of something becomes completely or almost completely untethered from its extrinsic value. If we can afford to pay $40 million for a painting, the pleasure and satisfaction we will derive from looking at the painting cannot be related to what we are prepared to pay for it. We instead begin to ascribe value by how much others would be willing to pay.

If the purchaser of a $40 million painting became suddenly poor, it would, one can imagine, become much more important for him to eat and stay sheltered than to look at his painting, but eating and staying sheltered would cost far less.

Only when a thing is more or less ubiquitous does its extrinsic value relate closely to its intrinsic value.

A great work of literature, easily mass-produced, can be had for a few bucks. So, too, a wonderful piece of music can be heard and played over and over on vinyl or compact disk for the cost of a modest lunch. Even a live performance by the best in their field won’t cost you more than a nice sweater. And a visit to a good art museum where you can see some of the most fabulous works of art on display is sometimes free. The artworks themselves are worth millions because they are rare and must be owned by one and only one person at a time.

When we get confused between intrinsic and extrinsic value we diminish our sense of life’s value. I think about this, oddly, in relation to the intended purchase of Yahoo! by Microsoft. Yahoo! has spurned Microsoft’s advance. But even though here we’re talking about companies that have intrinsic worth (by virtue of their assets and ability to make money) I cannot help but feel that here is a similar disconnect between intrinsic and extrinsic value. Microsoft is willing to pay a hefty premium for Yahoo! in the hopes of countering Google’s success by leveraging a joint presence. But Google’s value derives from something quite different from assets and relationships. Google has mastered the art of leveraging finite intrinsic worth to produce vast extrinsic worth. Google is the Picasso of the Internet search world. And to beat a Picasso you don’t merge the ideas of two second-rate artists counting on them complementing one another’s styles.

Monet’s “Le Pont d’Argenteuil” at the Orsay Museum in Paris - badly damaged by intruders Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007.

(You can see the 4 inch tear below the bridge.)

In a related article, the French Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, calls for better security and tougher sanctions against people who commit such acts of vandalism because, as she said “they are attacking our history.”

Another interesting aspect of the report is that it seems that the painting can be repaired. Presumably it would be impossible for a future museum visitor to know whether the painting had been repaired or not.

This reminds me of two other incidents: One from a New Yorker article, and one from my own life.

The New Yorker, September 24, 2007, article on Marie-Laure de Noailles - The Surrealist’s Muse, at one point describes how one of Marie-Laure’s lovers — a Spanish painter named Oscar Dominguez — made money by by copying Marie-Laure’s Picassos and selling the originals, leaving his forgeries in their place.

My wife bought me a lovely old Alfa Romeo “Spider” sports car for my birthday. It turns out that the car’s floor is rusted, a fatal problem. But in the course of investigating what could be done, if anything, to repair the damage, I discovered that, with old cars, enthusiasts value authenticity, including authenticity of a repair, so highly that an inauthentic repair (using a modern, custom-shaped floor panel rather than an original panel) would render the car practically worthless.

Is Albanel right in saying that an attack on a work of art is an attack on history? If a clever forgery can fool its owner, does the value of a work lie in the art or its pedigree? And if a car looks and drives as if it were intact, does the knowledge that it is patched with a modern piece of material diminish its inherent value?

All of these questions seem interrelated. The core question seems to be how and why do we attach the concept of value to an object or the idea of an object?

We may have several reasons for perceiving value in Monet’s painting of a bridge: We find the painting itself aesthetically pleasing. We find Monet’s work generally pleasing and therefore value this work as part of the body of his work. We value the effort and skill exerted in producing such a work of art. We find value in the work of art as a component of our cultural history… I’m sure there must be several other distinct reasons for perceiving value in the painting.

Likewise with my Alpha Romeo. I value it because I like the way it looks and drives. An enthusiast may value it for its authenticity and degree of intactness. A scrap metal merchant may value it as a heap of smeltables.

The concept of value in a forgery is a little trickier. Before we know it is a forgery, we may believe we value it for its place in a body of work, or for the skill of the original artist. But knowledge of its true pedigree makes it impossible to value a forged Picasso as a Picasso. (Although we could still value it as a skillful copy.)

All of which results in two important clarifications: When we think or talk about the value of a thing, it helps if we’re clear about the ground of the value, what is it based on from our perspective, allowing that others will have their own perspectives. The second clarification is that when we attach our sense of value to the idea of a thing (its pedigree, its place in a greater body of work, etc.) we are no longer valuing the thing itself, but an idea of the thing.

This second point, I believe, resolves the paradox that we can at one moment believe something very valuable, only to realize a moment later that it is worthless. The thing itself hasn’t changed, but our idea of it has.

For a work of art to have inherent value for us, then, that value must be attached to something immediate, such as its aesthetic impression.

This brings me back to my original conundrum. While I feel the emotional tug of the sentiment expressed by the French Culture Minister, that those who damage works of art should be more heavily sanctioned, I can’t find the logical support for it. What the idiots did was to damage a painting. Any attack on history resides only in the minds of those who perceive the idea of Monet’s painting as a part of French cultural history. Should criminal sentencing be influenced by something so subjective?