[ocimbote]

> Unless I absolutely want to consume the art you make, why would I want to pay for it?

I understand that "if there's an act of buying, there's consumption" from your perspective, but I'd mostly disagree with that statement and actually, I think it's quite a narrow perspective.

For every act of buying, there's an act of selling. But in the reality I see, many artists sell to produce rather than they produce to sell. So the act of selling is quite flawed from, say, a company selling its products, and the same is true for the act of buying: many don't buy to own or consume, but to support or for a naively genuine sense of beauty.

You may very well boil it down to "money give, money take" but the symbolic here is far stronger than the capitalist perspective of art as a market.

Also, I'm not ignoring the attraction of the market for artists and buyers alike, it's just not the whole story.