Value, Art, and Commodity (More Fun With Math)

Not too long ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a report with a sassy illustration and the clever, intriguing headline, "How Corn Became Like Vegas."

The subtitle: "Rising Oil Prices, Zest for Ethanol Heat Up the Futures Markets; Hedging on the 'Ags' Maze?"

This July 26 Money & Investing section cover story touched on many of the issues that Not A Cornfield visitors and team members have discussed publicly.

Not mentioned in the piece -- nor should it have been -- was a discourse about the value of art. As a team that's spoken many times about the conceptual, and literal, comparison between the economic return possible from selling post-harvest kernels as "art" or as "agricultural," we figured we better break out the Not A Cornfield commodities calculator again.

The story, written by Ann Davis, notes that the price of corn futures had risen 11% this year, up to $2.3950 per bushel. A bushel, the story explains, is "equal to 56 pounds of shelled corn, or the number of kernels on about 90 ears of corn."

A previous post on this blog detailed that a regular visitor to NAC counted 133,694 ears of corn hanging on the project's then-Wall of Corn fenceline. **UPDATED BELOW**

That fence, then, by our calculations contained 1,485.49 bushels.

Which meant that as of July 25, anyway, the portion of the NAC crop that wound up on the fence could have fetched $3,557.75 on the commodities market.

What, though, if it was sold as art?