You are talking about a lower bound. I can create a painting with a value equivalent to trash. I can take energy and throw it in the dumpster. This energy is wasted and therefore worthless. This is common sense.

But can I create a painting of infinite value? In the history of mankind... has there been an object of such immense value that society has deemed the object worth more than the value of all the lives of humans that have ever existed? No. By virtue of common sense no such product has existed. If no such product has existed then likely there must be a hard physical upper limit to value.

However, this example only hints at a fuzzy description of an upper bound to value. It is not clear what this upper bound exactly is... because a human can use his imagination and say that a piece of paper is worth 2 billion dollars. If human thought has no limits and if human thought determines the value of all things, why don't there exist objects that are worth 2 google gabillion dollars?

Let us develop a concrete definition for value with our first example: the painting. Also let us examine this painting in the hypothetical context of an island bartering economy of two economic actors: a painter and a potato farmer.

The farmer creates products of concrete physical value: food. Food is a product made of energy extracted from the earth and the sun. The painter makes products of abstraction, a painting: an object supposedly worth more than the sum of its parts.

Let's throw this economic simulation in motion. What is the maximum value of a painting produced by the artist? Can the potato farmer say that the painting is worth 10 trillion potatoes when his maximum potato production rate is 2 per day? No. This is impossible. No 10 trillion potato-painting transaction can take place in this economy because the amount of potatoes is limited to 20 per day. Thus in an economy of a farmer and artist the value of the painting is bounded by the total potatoes the farmer can produce.

Lets look at the absurd example of an economy with two economic actors of two painters. Both painters produce a painting and they both trade each other paintings. Then they starve to death because there are no potatoes to eat in the economy. This absurd example illustrates one thing: All economies cannot be made up of solely abstract products of overblown value. All economies must have concrete physical primitives like food an energy to function correctly otherwise people will starve or nothing can happen. An economy of pure abstraction is an economy made of hopes, dreams and imagination, such an economy cannot exist in reality.

So in conclusion what does this mean? It means two things:

1. All economies must have concrete physical products to function. Economies cannot be made up of only abstract paintings, poems and stories.

2. All abstract products within an economy are bounded by how much it can be paid for by the total amount of physical product in an economy.

Thus the conclusion is inescapable. THE VALUE OF ALL PRODUCTS PAINTINGS OR ANYTHING are bounded by PHYSICAL LAW and PHYSICAL LIMITS.

The notion that value is an ephemeral imaginative thing is an illusion. This makes sense in the context of the universe.