Art: Pre-capitalist conspicuous waste?

Felix Salmon :

That’s real money, which, in a working capitalist economy, can and should be spent on productive assets. Instead, it’s being spent on utterly unproductive assets: billions and billions of dollars a year are going, in the name (at least partially) of “investment”, into paintings by long-dead artists. If rich people stopped paying billions of dollars for each others’ art, and started spending that money in the real economy, that would create jobs, growth, and even opportunities for working artists.

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