Gossip Girl 3.03 “The Lost Boy” (aka Exchange Value)
If there’s anything that Mao Zedong, Milton Friedman, and Publilius Syrus could find common ground on, it’s that “Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.” The Marxian name for this is exchange value, in that the worth of something is determined at the point of transaction. Nowhere is this more evident than in an auction, where a madding crowd swarms over scarcities and determines what the prices of things really are. But one of the questions that art, and especially good art, wrestles with is how this economic truth clashes with the messy margin-less frontiers of human nature. Can you put a price on your lover? On the bonds of family? On vengeance?
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