Priceless

 It all started when I first heard about Bruce Springsteen selling his music to Sony. All the recordings. All the publishing. The words and the music. For a tidy little sum. No, strike that. There is nothing tidy or little about half a billion dollars. For a few minutes I wrestled with that figure and tried to imagine all the places and ways that five hundred million dollars could exist in one place. That scraping sound inside my head was competing with all the times I have felt joy and release as a direct result of those words and music. I tried to imagine the negotiation. Sure, "Born To Run" is worth untold millions, but then there's the stuff on the Human Touch album that should probably be packaged with some stronger material to get it off the shelves. 

But who am I to assign a dollar value to art? The relative success of an artist is based almost exclusively on promotion. Which is probably why paintings and books and music become so much more valuable once the person who created it dies. Death is a great sales tool. The fact that Mister Springsteen was able to make such a monster deal while he was still around to wallow in it is a tribute to his talent.

I suppose. 

This came on the heels of the announcement that Eric Clapton had successfully sued a woman for selling a bootleg CD of his music on eBay. She was paid twelve dollars, and now she's liable for about four thousand dollars in court fees. This affirmed my current feelings about Mister Clapton, but what am I to do with my attitudes toward Bruce? Hero of the working man, blue collar troubadour, good friend of Barack Obama. I have often imagined a chance meeting between myself and The Boss, but that half billion dollars is a pretty good measuring stick for the distance between our worlds. 

Which doesn't mean that I will be burning any of his records, books, T-shirts or CDs any time soon. I paid for them, after all. I am a victim of pop culture, it seems. You can see it in the way that I felt pleased and gratified by the success of the latest Spider Man movie. Boffo box office numbers to which I contributed won't do much for me but assure a sequel. And ultimately another shot at disappointment. 

Meanwhile, this past weekend I also went on a pre-holiday visit to see my younger brother's new apartment, and the surrounding area. On our walk through San Anselmo, we stopped by the Artists Within gallery. Here we found paintings and jewelry and weaving and art created by the clients of Cedars. My brother had stories about all the artists, with whom he had worked over the past few years, and celebrated their fearless creations. The art there was for sale. Some of the pieces were more expensive than others, but I remembered the struggles my brother had endured trying to arrive at a price point for his own work. What is the difference between a seven hundred fifty dollar sculpture and a seven thousand five hundred dollar sculpture after you pay for the materials? The zeros. 

And even now, as I pursue my own muse from the relative quiet and safety of this keyboard, I can set aside the dollars and cents and assign my own value to the things on which I place value. A well-turned phrase, or a high note held for that extra second, or the collected works of a musician from Freehold, New Jersey.