The paradox completes itself: the more original Ramanujan was, the less usable his work became within the academic economy of his day. His genius was structurally incompatible with the currency of wealth and power. Like Tesla, his reward was posthumous sainthood---a statue in India, a biopic in Hollywood---but no translation into the bread and warmth he desperately needed in his lifetime.
C. Van Gogh vs. Art Dealers (Arts and Cultural Economy)
If Tesla's pigeons and Ramanujan's notebooks break your heart, then Van Gogh's story is designed to shatter it. For in the arts, the asymmetry reaches its grotesque crescendo: genius is not merely unrewarded---it is commodified after death at a scale unimaginable in life.
Van Gogh: the painter of the unseen.
A man who bled color onto canvas with the desperation of one wrestling demons. He sold almost nothing during his lifetime---famously, perhaps only a single painting. He lived on the financial lifeline of his brother Theo, his stomach often emptier than his canvases were full. His brushwork broke with the conventions of his day, vibrating with intensity that dealers dismissed as amateurish or insane. His curiosity capital was aesthetic, not economic.
Art Dealers: the necrophiliacs of value.
For them, genius becomes valuable precisely when it becomes inaccessible---when the artist can no longer produce more, when the supply is forever capped. While Van Gogh wrestled with poverty, psychosis, and loneliness, the market dismissed him. But once he put a bullet in his chest at age 37, the market suddenly found him irresistible. His death was not the end of his poverty; it was the beginning of their profits.
This is the most perverse instantiation of the asymmetric reward law:
While alive, Van Gogh was an economic zero.
Once dead, he became a speculative commodity worth hundreds of millions.
The satire is obscene. Paintings once bartered for meals now hang in climate-controlled vaults, traded among oligarchs like derivatives. Dealers write catalogues dripping with reverence, investors toast glasses of champagne at Sotheby's, and the gavel falls at $100 million---all while Van Gogh, if resurrected, would still be unable to afford the ticket to his own auction.
The system here is not blind---it is vampiric. It requires the suffering and death of genius to fuel its speculative machinery. Van Gogh's poverty was not incidental; it was functional. His madness was not a flaw; it became his brand. And his suicide was the ultimate "scarcity event," fixing supply at a finite number of canvases forever. The art market does not celebrate his genius; it celebrates his absence.
The satire deepens: Van Gogh has become the world's most famous poor artist, the mascot of "unappreciated genius." His legacy has been neatly packaged into a myth that comforts the living art world, allowing dealers and collectors to profit guilt-free. They can cry at his letters to Theo while cashing checks written in his name.
Thus, Van Gogh exposes the final stage of the Genius Wealth Illusion: wealth does not just bypass genius---it feeds parasitically on genius's very suffering and demise. In this case, poverty itself was the essential precondition for posthumous wealth.
D. Contemporary Parallel: AI Researchers vs. Big Tech
