Table of Contents Show
Most people think value is something you “discover”. But if you zoom out for even a second, you realize the opposite is true:
We manufacture value.
Not in a factory. In the mind.
And once you see that, the world starts to look different.
A faux pearl necklace worn by Jacqueline Kennedy sold for $211,000, despite being made of glass beads.
A single strawberry from Kyoto sold for $19 at Erewhon in Los Angeles, becoming a viral symbol of luxury and excess.
A Cheeto shaped kind of like Charizard… “Cheetozard”, sold for $87,840 at auction.
No rare minerals. No magical materials. Just stories.
These aren’t freak occurrences.
They’re high-resolution snapshots of how humans construct meaning inside a noisy world.
If you’re a curator, collector, interactive artist, HCI researcher, anyone working inside the cultural idea-space, you already know this.
But you may not have the language for it yet.
Because as immersive installations, behavioral interfaces, and media arts ecosystems evolve, value has less to do with matter and more to do with meaning.
The narrative is the real engine behind culture, behind markets, behind everything people pretend is rational.
It’s always the narrative.
Let’s break down the psychology behind it. Not to manipulate people, but to understand the cultural mechanics we’re already swimming in.
What Is Value? A Psychological Foundation
Value is not inherent. Value is relational.
Behavioral economics shows that humans rely on shortcuts, scarcity, reference points, social cues, and emotional resonance to judge worth.
These aren’t just errors. They’re cultural tools.
Meaning making systems.
In art and museum environments, value crystallizes when an object becomes a vessel for significance.
Here’s how it happens:
- A story anchors it.
- Provenance amplifies it.
- Identity fuses to it.
- Culture validates it.
- Emotion locks it in place.
The more a piece resonates through memory, beauty, narrative, or group identity, the higher its perceived value climbs, regardless of its physical substrate.
Material reality is the stage. Meaning is the performance.
When Materials Don’t Matter
The Auction That Broke Everyone’s Brain
The Smithsonian documents Jacqueline Kennedy’s famous triple strand pearls as glass beads, not gemstones.
And yet they sold at auction for around $211,000, later reported in the context of the Franklin Mint’s acquisition and reproduction.
Materiality wasn’t just irrelevant. It was almost invisible.
What the buyer really purchased was symbolic proximity.
A feeling of owning a slice of cultural narrative. The object was just the vessel.
How Replication Turned Into a $26M Machine
After acquiring the necklace, Lynda Resnick worked with the Franklin Mint to reproduce it.
The reproductions were priced at about $200 each, and they reportedly sold around 130,000 units, generating roughly $26 million in revenue.
That’s not just merch. That’s a scalable story engine.
For museums, the lesson is simple:
Provenance: real, borrowed, or translated creates an aura that can be leveraged across mediums, contexts, and audiences.
As a new media artist and digital art collector, I learned that truth early.
It was never about the artwork or material.
It was always the narrative, the story surrounding the artwork, or the story orbiting the artist.
Culture Creates Value
Japan’s Luxury Fruit Tradition
In Japan, luxury fruit isn’t just “nice produce”.
It operates as a prestige gift, deeply tied to tradition, ceremonial gifting, and artisanal cultivation.
High end melons, strawberries, and grapes can sell for huge sums, sometimes hundreds or thousands of dollars, because they’re treated as edible art rather than everyday groceries.
The Meaning Migrates to Los Angeles
When Erewhon in Los Angeles started selling a single strawberry from Kyoto for about $19, it went viral as both a novelty and a symbol of excess.
The Guardian framed it as an almost end of empire moment, connecting it to debates on decadence and luxury.
People magazine covered the same berry as a “dystopian” grocery item, highlighting TikTok backlash, social commentary, and Erewhon’s defense of the price and logistics.
So the berry’s value wasn’t just about taste.
It was about context: imported cultural symbolism, scarcity, and narrative.
Curators do this all the time: Move an object into a new environment → change its story → shift its value.
Value is a contextual technology.
Museums use it every day, even when they don’t say it out loud.
Symbolism, Play & Absurdity
When Meme Culture Becomes Market Culture
In early 2025, a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto resembling the Pokémon Charizard nicknamed “Cheetozard”, was sold through Goldin’s auction platform for $87,840, including buyer’s premium.
The snack is mass produced junk food. The bag is ordinary.
But the symbol? That was priceless.
Rarity, nostalgia, recognizable silhouette, and social virality all connected into a single absurd but highly legible cultural artifact.
Absurdity as a Value Engine
In digital culture, absurdity is not a bug. It’s a feature.
Absurdity → Attention → Narrative → Value
Coverage from mainstream outlets like People and AP News shows exactly this dynamic:
The story of “someone paid nearly $90k for a Cheeto” becomes the real product.
Museums acquiring memes and internet ephemera aren’t chasing fads; they’re documenting the symbolic economy of our time.
The psychological mechanism is simple: Absurdity signals insider status. If you get it, you belong.
And belonging is expensive.
That’s the same reason NFTs and meme coins blew up in the crypto markets:
They were narrative engines disguised as assets.
Spending millions on a punk JPEG wasn’t about the pixels…
It’s about buying your way into a culture of high net-worth individuals who share the same culture.
Simple.
Microcultures and Value Systems
Step inside any microculture, such as sneakerheads, audiophiles, and mechanical keyboard enthusiasts, and you’ll see value being handcrafted in real time.
- A stitching error becomes rarity.
- A switch type becomes “feel”.
- A specific pressing of vinyl becomes “the warm one”.
Their value systems are authenticated through expertise, ritual, and insider vocabulary.
The same pattern appears in interactive and HCI-driven installations: a niche audience emerges, builds a shared language around the work, and starts treating specific experiences or moments as canon.
Value compounds where community depth meets narrative detail.
Community → Narrative → Value.
That’s when an installation stops being “an exhibit” and becomes a cult object in a microculture’s value system.
Memory, Identity & Sentimental Value
Sentimental value is the most durable value humans have ever created.
Behavioral research repeatedly finds that objects tied to personal memories, like gifts, heirlooms, and childhood artifacts, are judged as “priceless”, even when identical items without that history are basically worthless in the market.
Museums are built on this principle, even when they don’t state it explicitly.
A scratched watch. A childhood toy. A visitor’s emotional moment inside an immersive installation.
Interactive, sensor based, and personalized artworks excel at this: they create one-off value events.
Moments that feel unrepeatable and intimately yours.
You’re not just designing objects. You’re designing memory anchors.
How Value Is Designed
Framing Changes Everything
Value can be intentionally influenced, ethically, through the same elements curators and media artists already manipulate:
- narrative sequencing
- spatial framing
- lighting and sound
- provenance storytelling
- participation loops
- pacing and attention sculpting
You’re not just shaping experience; you’re shaping interpretation.
And interpretation is where meaning and, therefore, value emerge.
Design for Meaning, Not Price
The highest value experiences are not merely expensive.
They’re transformative.
Visitors forget labels and dates. They remember what the experience did to them.
So the real question, for curators, collectors, and creators, is:
What emotional imprint do we want to embed in the visitor’s mind?
Once you answer that, you can reverse engineer the framing, narrative, and interaction design to support it.
Conclusion
Value doesn’t live in objects.
Value lives in relationships between viewer and story, culture and symbol, memory and meaning.
We’re not rational consumers. We’re meaning makers.
For museums, collectors, and creators, that’s good news.
It means value can be cultivated through intention, care, and imaginative design.
It means interactive and HCI-driven work is not an outlier; it’s central to how modern value is made.
So instead of asking:
“What is this worth?”
Start asking:
“What does this allow someone to feel, understand, or become?”
That’s where the real leverage is. And what you do with that is entirely up to you.
