• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, June 5, 2015

Pssst… Wanna buy some art? It’s awesome, I swear. For the low, low price of just $90,000, you can go to this website, pick the image you like, and I’ll blow it up and mount it for you.

It’s not my website, but that doesn’t matter. I also didn’t take the pictures -- but that doesn’t matter either. Apparently, the real value is created by blowing up the images, printing them, and mounting them. That’s why I don’t have to share a penny with the website, the original photographer, or the model.

You won’t buy any from me, though. This particular art heist (and, oh, it is a heist, on so many levels) already became old news when a chap named Richard Prince pulled it off at the Frieze Art Fair in New York.

People were up in arms, obviously. And yet the works sold. As @carlycarbonate tweeted, “Who is potentially worse than Richard Prince? Obviously the people willing to spend $100k on an Instagram screenshot.”

Let’s loop back to paragraph two, which contains the core question of this column and one of the great questions of the digital age: Where, exactly, is value created?

This is not a new question. Two years ago, the ever-brilliant Amanda Palmer began encouraging everyone to embrace the art of asking, of being unafraid and unashamed to throw oneself on the mercy of the crowd. At the time, I wondered, “Where in this vision is there room for the introverted virtuoso, the prodigal performer whose art rests in the art itself and who does not, when offstage, seek direct intimate relationships with thousands of people?”

There is less and less room for that person. Content got deposed as king some time ago, and in its place we’ve seen marketing, positioning, storytelling emerge triumphant.

On a visit to the Museum of Modern Art this week, I had an Emperor’s New Clothes experience of wondering whether the installers had mistaken a janitor’s rag as a work selected by the curator. “This object,” I thought, “becomes art when mounted on a huge, blank, white wall, with a description written in Helvetica Neue, and the lighting just so.” So is the value in the work, or is the value in the wall, the description, the lighting, the imposing MoMA environs?

The question of where value is created becomes ever more critical across a whole range of content industries, as we move away from well-understood, largely analog business models and towards a digitized economy. Prince’s Instagram exhibit showed that the value of photography doesn’t necessarily lie in the taking of the picture. It is almost impossible for musicians to make the minimum wage by streaming tracks -- but Spotify has $1.3 billion in revenues and is working on a deal that would value the company at $8 billion.

So the value in this industry lies in distribution, not songs; for musicians to realize some of this value, they have to distribute their music themselves by performing it live. And the question of where value is created in journalism becomes ever more critical to a well-functioning democracy, as the answer appears to shift further and further toward a clickbait model designed to attract eyeballs at all costs.

I hope you weren’t hoping to get an answer to the value question in this column, because I sure don’t have one. But Prince’s cheeky appropriation of others’ works is a symptom of a much bigger problem: the divergence of what we want and what we’re willing to pay for. As long as we’re willing to pay for a blown-up print of a stranger’s Instagram, we’ll struggle to find true value anywhere.