In the 21st century, the most valuable resources are not tangible materials like oil or steel. They are "information" and "data"—things with neither form nor weight. The information provision industry—which processes and sells invisible data through fields like financial engineering, consulting, wealth management, or big data analysis—has established itself as the largest and most sophisticated business of our time.
Yet, if we quietly peer behind the curtain of these high-tech industries, a bizarre sense of déjà vu suddenly washes over us. The "information asymmetry" where the seller knows but the buyer does not, and the "opacity" that makes it nearly impossible to objectively measure value—as these conditions reach their peak, these highly sophisticated businesses increasingly resemble not a trade selling commodities, but rather the eccentric artistic performances taking place in contemporary art museums.
Are we facing a business right now, or are we witnessing the most extreme form of art?
The Magic of Credit Built on an Opaque Canvas
Realms like the information industry and consulting generate profits by strictly exploiting gaps in knowledge. Consumers "can never know before purchasing" whether that information will truly be useful to them or if it is worth the proposed price tag. The sole force that clears away this opaque fog to seal a deal is the "credit" and "brand narrative" built by the provider.
This structure perfectly overlaps with the very heart of contemporary art. When a piece featuring a single banana duct-taped to a white wall sells for hundreds of thousands of dollars, what determines that price is not the sweetness of the fruit. It is the authority of the art world guaranteeing that "this has immense value," alongside the layers of esoteric information barriers stacked up by critics.
Ultimately, in that they generate astronomical value out of intangible assets purely through a "system of belief," the sophisticated information industry and contemporary art are pulling off the exact same magic trick.
Creators Painting Illusions with Data as Their Medium
The sophistication of the information industry does not mean the mere act of scraping and delivering raw data. It refers to the ability to capture meaningful context among tens of thousands of useless figures and reconstruct it into "one grand narrative" that mesmerizes the client.
Looking at the exact same market indicators, one information provider reads a crisis of ruin, while another packages it as the prelude to a monumental opportunity. This is no different from the act of an artist who reinterprets a stray object on the street through their own unique gaze and captures it on canvas. Though they use facts as their raw materials, what they ultimately sell to the client is an "illusion" under the name of value. They wear the mask of business, but in reality, they are engaging in a highly advanced act of creation.
The Aesthetics of Silicon Valley and the Artists of Wall Street
When this boundary completely collapses, we sometimes witness "business innovation," but we also occasionally confront the "scams of the century."
Think of the presentations delivered by countless tech startups in Silicon Valley to attract investment. Concealing technologies that do not even exist yet behind a veil of information opacity, they secure valuations of trillions of won solely through a bold narrative and vision. In that moment, their pitch is closer to a massive piece of conceptual art performance designed to bewitch the public rather than a business plan. There is a reason why financial engineers, who engineer value behind complex equations and opaque data, are playfully called the "artists of Wall Street."
Inside the Grey Zone of a Grand Myth
As the information industry grows more sophisticated, it ceases to be a "business" in the classical sense. It approaches a highly psychological artistic act, painting value with the brushstrokes of "interpretation and belief" onto a canvas of knowledge gaps and opacity.
The moment we question, "Is that information truly worth that much?" or "Is this painting truly worth tens of millions of dollars?" we have already walked into the grey zone of the myth they have meticulously constructed.
In the end, the most successful businessmen of the 21st century may be the shrewdest, coolest artists of all—those who locate the opaque territories where the public cannot perceive value and dominate the stage with their own language. Inside the invisible world they have created, we willingly part with our money today, playing our part in their grand drama of value.
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