Judged by the value of its raw materials alone, Van Gogh's Starry Night is worth maybe thirty or forty dollars. When we compute The value of Van Gogh's labor, calculated on The realistic basis of what he earned per hour Throughout his career, we come to a value of perhaps two hundred dollars.
Whenever I reflect on This, I get queasy, because countless treasures, priceless things, are tossed info the scrap heap every day, simply because the caretaker of the moment recognized nothing priceless about it. Take a pencil sketch by Monet out of the frame, put it in a pile of a dozen other papers, and the Monet becomes virtually invisible. In that context, it requires the perceptive and discriminating eye of one who makes a passionate study of graphic marks upon paper to elevate the drawing from its environment.
Most of them don't make it. They get tossed - studios are cleaned, heirlooms are left in attics, then sold off in estate sales by disinterested grandchildren, they wind up in the hands of a dealer who does not appreciate what he or she is selling. A house burns, a roof leaks, damp creeps up from the basement, leaving mildew everywhere it goes. This is all part of the attrition which is an ongoing process in art. The body of accumulated art is losing individual members - sketches, lithographs, etchings, paintings - all the time.
We can postpone the inevitable day when a given piece of work must return to the dust from which the artist shaped it - we can do this by putting a frame around it, which separates the drawing from The environment, gives it an added weight That is recognizable by most people. We can extend the life of a given work by puffing it within a collection. A collection of art is to individual paintings what nation-states are to people. By becoming a citizen of a particular collection, that individual work benefits by the association of its kind. It finds security in numbers, and, if the collection is sufficiently powerful, protection from rain and snow, and vandalism. it receives health care in the form of cleaning and repair. It receives a social status, by virtue of its accessibility, in the form of ongoing study by historians and curators, all of whom contribute to the body of literature associated with the work, increasing its reputation (and therefore its chances of survival).
By putting our works within frames, by incorporating them into collections, by increasing their reputations, we can postpone the inevitable day of dissolution, but we cannot put it off forever. It is in the nature of things that all collections are ultimately dispersed or destroyed. Pieces are sold off, lost, stolen, attributions misplaced, entire collections dissolved.
The individual works are then on their own, again. And eventually they will each, like the people who made them, pass away. They die, and this makes me full of sorrow. The life of Picasso's Blind Guitarist is as precariously balanced as mine. I'd like to think it had some kind of permanency I do not. Change a single condition in either its life or my own, and all other conditions are modified - and it takes only one modification to end my life, or a painting's.
But this shouldn't make me sorrowful - that is only my selfish human longings speaking. The loss of a priceless painting is no more a thing, and no less a thing, than the loss of a priceless human life. Dying, the perpetual process of attrition associated with life, is all simply part of the ceaseless cycle of being.