I propose a conversation about art and commerce. These questions have rattled me for years. The conversation has guided my choices. At the root of that question is the value of the art object itself. Ultimately I am talking about things, not ideas.

Dave Hickey recognizes the "hard spine" of the matter in his classic explorations of the nature of beauty:

The give-and-take through which we ascertain the relative value of objects derives from the haggle of the marketplace. At the same time, even though there is always a hard market in objects at the spine of our arguments about beauty, most of the buying and selling is verbal and symbolic, something closer to a civic forum in which objects (often in the possession of others) are elected by free-floating constituencies of citizens as incarnations of their shared pleasures and desires. (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Last-Word-Is-Beauty/136409/)