[rotw]

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/...

Here's some more contextual information on it: 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.)