I’ve got it! The thing that I’ve been groping towards. It’s been percolating in the back of my mind for a while. I’ve been struggling with it for years: what buyers and viewers see as valuable as opposed to what I as the artist think is valuable. It come to light suddenly during an assignment for sculpture class. We were assigned to make multiples of objects. I was thinking about (for her assignment in 2019) how my multiples of plaster castings spray-painted metallic did end up looking like metal to some people. I was thinking also about my family, and the story of the gold bracelets: how my grandmother sold them to buy our family rice during war time. My grandmother traded gold bracelets for rice. What does that mean about value? Is rice worth more than gold? How are objects perceived as valuable simply based on their surroundings? I remember the time when Banksy sold one of his paintings on the streets of NYC for a laughable amount ($20?) as a street artist and no one bought it. He was already famous. He did it as a prank. How do people assign value? Is bitcoin valuable? Is gold valuable? Or is it the art behind the gold? The sculpture behind the material? The story behind the sculpture? The person behind the story?
What is real and what is fake and how do we assign value because of it?
Gold artifact.