Saturday night, and I am supposed to finish a Business worksheet on costs. Instead I open the sketchbook that live under my Maths folder, which is a bad filing system and an honest one. I draw a cup and a pear. Neither of them sit still in a useful way. The pear look slightly insulted.
I have been thinking about price all month, because Chekhov will not get out of my head, and because IGCSE Business keep asking what something cost. A drawing I make in an hour have a very clear cost: paper, a pencil that already in the tin, and the worksheet I do not finish. It have no price. Nobody will pay me for this pear. A print in a shop window, of a pear that look more like a pear, have a number stuck in the corner. The number is not the fruit. It is the permission to take the image home.
That gap is the part I like, and also the part that bother me. In class we say price is what you pay and value is what you think you got. My sketch have value only to me, which sound selfish until I remember that most of the music I love start as someone sitting in a room, making a version that is not for sale yet. The music box in June is the same idea, punched into card. The shop box next to it would have a barcode.
I am not claiming the pear is art. It is a pear with a lopsided shadow. What I am claiming is that “worth nothing” is a market sentence, not a true one. Markets are useful. They tell you what other people will swap. They do not tell you whether the hour was wasted. If I finish the worksheet, I will have a neater page and a less insulted piece of fruit. Both of those are kinds of production. Only one of them can go in a markbook.
Finance, the way I want study it later, is supposed to be about allocating scarce things. Time is the scarcest thing I actually own. Tonight I allocate it to a drawing that will never be an asset. I can already hear the merchant in the play calling that vulgar in the opposite direction. I do not mind. I need to see the cup become a set of lines before I can go back to the table of costs, which is also a set of lines, only less round.
The worksheet is still on the desk. I will do it. The pear can stay ugly. I like that it do not have a price tag. If it did, I will probably start drawing it to please the tag, and then it will not be my pear at all.