If you pay for something that already exists, like a piece of fine art, that money doesn't disappear, it just changes hands. The buyer could have spent that money on fighting poverty, but now the seller has the money, and you could say the same thing about them. The net amount of wealth in the world is unchanged.
Buying things that need to be produced is the real problem. When you buy a new private jet, you're adding demand to an industry. That transaction re-allocates tens of thousands of man-hours to aircraft production, man-hours that could instead be going towards any other cause that has marginally more utility to the rest of society.
Provenance isn't the issue, the issue is people with money paying others to work on projects that solely benefit themselves rather than benefiting the less fortunate.
Buying things that need to be produced is the real problem. When you buy a new private jet, you're adding demand to an industry. That transaction re-allocates tens of thousands of man-hours to aircraft production, man-hours that could instead be going towards any other cause that has marginally more utility to the rest of society.
Provenance isn't the issue, the issue is people with money paying others to work on projects that solely benefit themselves rather than benefiting the less fortunate.