G'day Alan,
It's good to have you back.
A few thoughts came to my mind.
Humans use heuristics to help them make decisions in reasonably short time without having to analyze everything from scratch; otherwise, life would be non-functionable. Joshua Bell getting $32 in the streets could be because people may have associated street baskers with mediocre skills and hence not even pay attention to his playing. Or simply because people on the streets are going somewhere and don't have time to stop and listen. In contrast, going to a concert hall and paying big bucks to hear a musician play probably suggests that the musician is fantastic. Of course, in a concert hall situation, we are talking about selling to a crowd that is already sold on the product, and they are there specifically to hear the musician play. As to why people are willing to pay so much to listen to Joshua Bell, I don't think it's purely the story, but because he has achieved a very high level of skills that the vast majority of people cannot achieve. That high level of skill has allowed him to provide some form of pleasure (which can be acquired) to the rest of the others. Pleasure, evolutionarily speaking, comes as a positive feedback to something that is 'good' for our existence, whether it is material or not.
Princess Diana and George Clooney's clothes could have been highly valued because of their immense popularity. People like them for a variety of reasons like them having good-looks, great personalities, rich, etc. These are traits that everyone is desirous of because they are advantageous to living a better life. The affinity arising from our liking of these traits could have resulted in us wanting to be with them or like them, and the closest thing we could get is something closely associated with them - their clothes. At the bottom of all this, again I reckon, lies that sense of what is 'good' for us.
I'm also thinking about the phenomenon of why some island cultures appreciate fat women, while others appreciate waif-like models. I thought the former could be associated with survival logic (fatter = able to survive leaner periods, provide more resources to babies), while the latter could be because thinness in rich society is associated with glamour, wealth, the aesthetics of good looks, etc, which again, I would tie back to the evolutionary sense of what is 'good' for us in order to survive. Between the fat, the thin and the musician, the common thread could be that if I am ahead of the curve, I could probably do better in life than the rest of the laggards.
I think human beings have been a a bit of an evolutionary quirk in that we have come so far in so short a time. Our inbuilt evolutionary responses may have been warped by the "unnatural environment" that we have built, resulting in all these seemingly senseless responses, including to art and the Keris.
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