The "treasures" of our day

$58 million for Balloon Dog

Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic:

...There is also Ocean’s Eleven Meets the Third Reich, or The Monuments Men, the trashy and supercilious film that George Clooney has made about the search for art stolen by the Nazis, a philistine film about a band of anti-philistines, a caper movie with a jaunty score whose pieties and solemnities cannot disguise the fact that the only thing it believes in is its own coolness....But who would cower from snipers, or crawl through a mine, to save a Damien Hirst? And if a Balloon Dog were one day destroyed the way 
the Mantegna frescoes in the Ovetari Chapel in Padua were destroyed, what values and what experiences would 
we lack? No philosophical reflections about the cruelties of man and time would be warranted. The treasures of our day are hardly worth plundering.