The Online Photographer: The Trough of No Value
http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2009/02/the-trough-of-no-value.html

"Craftsmanship is a preservation method That's why "being famous" is a great way to preserve your work—because value is the #1 preservative for old objects. But want to know another? Craftsmanship. One of the great hazards of survival through time is the lack of a market and a lack of trade value, but another is simply shoddiness. (I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it's just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn't mean all of them were.) It's not just that things that are poorly made deteriorate more readily, it's also that they signal their own worthlessness."

"One of the problems of historical preservation is that people only tend to preserve things that are valuable. And the problem with that is that value fluctuates over time."

really interesting article on the "trough of no value": you buy something it decreases in value until it has no value, but then after a while it has valuer as an antique