The conventional view of art treats the artwork as a representation — a mirror held up to nature, society, or the inner life of the artist. Living Value Theory proposes a different model: the artwork as a value machine.
A value machine is a device that transforms value from one form into another. It takes in raw social energy — desire, anxiety, aspiration, grief — and returns it in a processed form that can be circulated, exchanged, and accumulated. The artwork does this through the specific operations of aesthetic mediation: condensation, displacement, symbolisation, and formal resolution.
This does not reduce art to economics. The point is rather that art participates in the same transactive processes that constitute social life more broadly, but does so through specifically aesthetic means.