A lot of your post touches on concepts touched upon in Walter Benjamin's classic essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. If you've not read

A lot of your post touches on concepts touched upon in Walter Benjamin's classic essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. If you've not read it, it's well worth it: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/... Here's some more contextual information on it: http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction http://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/The_Work_o... (Although Benjamin might object to the notion that art has value, in the sense of metaphorical value implying financial value and vice versa.)