Why Beauty, Justice and Weight Won’t Measure Fair Worth

Once upon a time--about 50 years ago--when there were fewer rich people and fewer poor people because there were fewer people, a portly Muslim sultan worth his weight in diamonds was the old Aga Khan. By now two generations have grown up too late to see the newsreel footage of that religious leader (who lived most of the time in France and never missed an important horse race in England) being celebrated by his Third World followers. They would hoist him up on one side of an enormous scale until his weight was balanced by heapings of precious jewels. To my generation that was the most vivid demonstration of the idea of “equal value.”

Toward the end of his life, as I remember, the Aga Khan was robbed of a small percentage of his jewels. One afternoon while his chauffeur was driving him and his wife on a mountainous road along the French Riviera, they were stopped in daylight by masked armed robbers who simply took all the jewelry that she, the Begum, was wearing and left causing no other harm. An editorial about this robbery, appearing in the New York Times, concluded with the judgment: “It couldn’t have happened to a richer man.”

Now, for the benefit of those two generations of humanity-watchers deprived of such memories, the past few weeks have been marked by a great international spectacle of competition for conspicuous consumption among some of the richest people in the world today. They demonstrate how unbridgeable is the gap between a social or a generally agreed upon public value and somebody’s subjective idea of a reasonable price, confirming the absurdity of calculating a relation between the qualities of a work of art and the quantities of money that enable it to change hands, and achieving new distinctions in any book of world’s records concerning inflation.

Just at this time a new book has come out showing the ways in which the art historian and aesthetician Bernard Berenson helped the British art dealer Joseph Duveen to fleece turn-of-the century American robber barons and bankers who wanted instantly to possess collections of art treasures comparable to the holdings of the Vatican or the Louvre--by adulterating paintings in order to inflate prices. We are also informed that an imperfectly preserved oil painting, one of the series of sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh which he was unable to sell in his lifetime, is purchased at auction for almost $40 million, or four times as much as any other painting has been paid for by anybody. Similarly, the jewelry of the late Duchess of Windsor sold for $50 million, or approximately five times its estimated worth. Does this not make you wonder what is meant by “estimated worth?”

How is one to react? It is possible to exercise outrage, as William Wilson did in The Times (Calendar, April 5) saying, “Clearly, paying $40 million for this poor thing is tainted with a kind of obscenity. The act of turning such a work into an overheated commodity . . . is a grotesque travesty of the human spirit in which it was made.” But what causes such outrage? Is it distress that so much of the world’s wealth should ever be paid for a mere painting? Or, given a passionate appreciation of such a painting, is it the sense that one will never be able to afford it oneself? This forces one to meditate on issues of values, of authenticity and forgery, of sentiment and sincerity--to remind ourselves what we are all about.

Let it not be forgotten that only a month ago came revelations that the former curator of antiquities for the Getty Museum in Santa Monica, Jiri Frel, ran a massive tax-fraud program through over-valuating donations to the museum. This is referred to as “a victimless crime,” but in fact those who are defrauded are the citizens of the United States who pay their fair share of taxes. The moot point is in the extreme difficulty of determining the financial worth of a work of art and whether at a specific price it is over-valued. What determines “a proper value?”

All of this is enough to reopen the philosophical question of “What is a just price?” which exercised the intellects of many a great thinker in the middle ages. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that the price of goods or services is “just” when it approximates the general opinion of society of the worth of the goods or services in relation to other goods; a seller who receives a just price for his goods is able to buy other goods equivalent in value. In other words, justice requires that in trading activities equivalent values be involved. In the Van Gogh case, outrage expresses the general opinion of society that this exchange is unfair, not a trade of equivalent values when one considers what else might be bought with $40 million. For example, four-fifths of the collection of the Duchess of Windsor’s jewelry. Or a million-dollar inheritence to each of your 40 favorite people; or feeding the population of Ethiopia for four months; or one of the most sophisticated military fighter-bombers (only one). But going this way we fast approach the realization that one person’s opinion of fairness is another’s judgment of the grossest injustice. This is why rationalist-minded economists dropped the idea of “a just price”; economics as a science cannot cope with the ideal of justice.

What makes any work of art valuable existentially, anyhow? Out of the endless flux of experience, art crystallizes forms that arrest our thoughts or feelings and focuses them in praise of the joys of life or in rage and lament against the absence of the joys of life. Thus, beyond articulating such gratitude or accusation, these “places of attention” console us for loss, disappointment and sorrow--or force us to abide with the discovery that no such consolation is possible. Then what can be an equivalent “trading” value for any one of those functions? Obviously, there is no objective or rational answer.

Since one cannot justify the price for the Van Gogh in socially approved economic terms, we must turn to the idea of possible “sentimental value.” What makes it so unconventionally or irrationally desirable? What feelings--what sentiments--are involved that can so inflate the selling price over current public conventions? In the case of the sunflowers, where a Japanese insurance firm took possession, the sentiment had to do with choosing to “pay anything” to take possession of a monument of Western civilization, one suggesting a Japanese influence in its creation--as a conquest. There is something perverse about this. It is on a par with buying London Bridge and setting it up in a Southwest U.S. desert. For the foreigner it is a form of “cultural transvestism.”

And the sentimental value attached to the jewelry given by the former King of England to the Duchess of Windsor? You have only to wonder how closely identified you would like to be with the lives of one of the greatest of royal twits and the most successful of all social-climbing dragon ladies ever to expatriate herself from anti-monarchist America. That would not be cultural transvestism but rather a peculiar kind of self-delusion, like imagining that the mannequin in a clothier’s window is flirting with you. As it is purely imaginary, a talisman for magical identification, the feeling is fake. While the jewelry here is genuine, the sentiment is the forgery. But one can be misled by false sentimental values just as easily as one can be taken in by deliberate deceptions. Either way one is misled into paying an unfair price.

The point is that nothing is worth its weight in something else. The intrinsic value of the Aga Khan is in no sense the “equivalent” of 300 pounds of diamonds. Despite the disguise of conventional economic terms, values are not equivalent and not transferable. They are always and only subjectively appreciated; therefore, individual and unique. All of our economic and social life is based on the symbolism of using objects (including money) for trading purposes as metaphors for their existential values. But we’ve always acknowledged the impossibility of comparative value in the received wisdom that cautions us against comparing apples and pears. Our outrage these days reminds us of this essential truth. To drive the point home: How many apples would it take to be worth their weight in pears?