View: You have to put a price to make something priceless
Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair, and iPhone 15 — put a value to them, a price that goes beyond the transactional. The Medicis in 15th century Florence bankrolled artists like Botticelli, Michelangelo and Leonardo — mind you, before they were Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo.
But how does one price such produce?
Cultures that are output-oriented tend to inject greater (quantifiable) value to creatively produced products than input-oriented ones. For the latter, more value is given, for instance, to how much effort — work — has been put in, in the making of the object.
For the former, after the basic input costs are taken into account, what you see becomes the starting point of determining its value.
Thus, an input-oriented society will extoll production in scale, how many hours employees clock in and out at work, etc. The output-oriented one cares only for the result, no matter how little effort it may have taken.
If the same Rome had indeed been built in a day, the city council would have paid the urban planners and architects very differently in both scenarios.
But how does the valuation of output-oriented cultures work? 'Salvator Mundi' (The Saviour of the World), attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, is the most expensive painting in the world, sold for $450.3 million in 2017 to Saudi Arabia's Mohamed bin Salman, for what I can only presume bragging rights, since it has never been exhibited since its purchase. The 5th most expensive painting today is Andy Warhol's 'Shot Sage Blue Marilyn', part of the artist's 1964 silkscreen paintings series, which was sold at $195 million to American art dealer Larry Gagosian.
