Word: worth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...derided by the English as "chocolate" (they are Hershey brown), still cost less than glued-and-screwed contemporary furniture-but probably not for long: already a Victorian sleigh bed sells for as much as $30,000. Early American furniture, particularly colonial adaptations of Queen Anne, Chippendale and Hepplewhite, are worth far more than 18th century English pieces of the same style...
...spiritual value has been confirmed, for millions, by its wondrous convertibility into cash. You can't argue with it. It means something if somebody pays $2.5 million for a lummocking spread of icebergs by Frederic Church, a salon machine whose pedestrian invocations of the sublime are not worth one square foot of a good Turner...
...17th century Holland, was known as the Tulip Mania. The tulip was then a comparatively new import from the Near East, and mutant specimens, with irregular stripes, were prized as rarities-so prized that men would mortgage their villas and their fields. The tulips had little intrinsic value. Their worth as commodities was a function of pure, irrational desire, and their economic fate proved that nothing is more manipulable than desire. When the mania fell away, the flowers were as pretty as they had been before. It was just that now few people wanted them very much, whereas before they...
...wonderful, we are told, that all things rise in price, as though in some universal resurrection and canonization of the dead. Twenty years ago, you might not have got $1,000 for the Pre-Raphaelite painting that now fetches $100,000. The $30,000 Tiffany lamp was not worth $3,000, and so on. One is left with the impression-indeed it is cultivated assiduously by the largest gaggle of public relations people ever to batten on the flank of culture-that art prices can only go up; the market has transcended its old uncertainty, whether the objects are million...
...church service each week, complete with restaurant-type ratings. Instead of cuisine or ambience, he rates worship service, music, sermon and friendliness, granting up to three stars in each category. In nearly two years Plagenz, who listened to many pulpit greats a generation ago, has found only two preachers worth three stars...