Your art supplies and time didn't create wealth in the economic sense ("the annual produce and labour of the nation" as Smith defines it, <https://en.wikisource

Your art supplies and time didn't create wealth in the economic sense ("the annual produce and labour of the nation" as Smith defines it, <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II/Chapter_3 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_II...>), but a financial asset, in the form of a (presumably) uniquely identifiable durable store of financial value. This is contrasted with economic wealth in which some inputs (capital, labour, raw materials (themselves generally considered as capital) are transformed into some immediately useful consumable product (say, food or fuel), a durable good (clothing, furniture), a service ("immediately extinguished" in the terms of some economists, but still having potential lasting positive value), or capital which can itself be used in future economic activities (machining equipment used in the manufacture of widebody aircraft, or the aircraft themselves). All else equal ("ceteris paribus"), the result of creating a novel but valued painting would be the same as that of inflating any other durable store of value: the relative prices of competing assets would fall proportionate to the price of the artwork. Ordinarily the drop is small and the bucket large such that this isn't noticed, but it is the net effect. David Ricardo is amongst the first economists to deal with the economics of collectibles and durable assets of which I'm aware, e.g., Ricardo’s value theory applies only to those commodities that ‘can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint’; it is thus not applicable to ‘rare statues and pictures, scarce books and coins, wines of a peculiar quality [...]’ (Works, I, 12) From The Anthem Companion to David Ricardo, Edited by John E. King, p. 169. <https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/anthem-companion-to-david-ricardo/ricardo-and-classical-political-economy/2167F014456DC17ABC011518A31738C7 https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/anthem-companion-to...>