But it doesn't take long to realize there's something different about it. The structure follows tradition, but the color doesn't : the temple is entirely white and seems to float above its surroundings, almost surreally. The strange shapes and the sheer level of detail, which at times recall European baroque architecture, immediately grab your attention. In reality, this temple is a clever fusion of traditional Buddhist art and contemporary art, layered with references to pop culture and to "modern feelings" that evoke surrealism or science fiction.

Built by the artist Chalermchai Kositpipat since 1997, he never set out to turn it into an international attraction. His original goal was simply to restore an old temple.

What's interesting here is the economic value art can generate. This is perhaps most visible with monumental, often architectural works like this temple, but there are plenty of other examples too : the famous paintings hanging in museums like the Louvre in Paris, or the Salvador Dalí house in Figueres, where staggering numbers of tourists, art lovers, and visitors from around the world come to stand in front of the Mona Lisa or the Raft of the Medusa. The same is true of major contemporary art museums like the Centre Pompidou or MoMA in New York. And it was exactly the same at the White Temple, I watched visitors who had traveled from the other side of the world lining up to buy their tickets, ready to spend two hours discovering this temple, its mysterious architecture, and to "feed on" a whole world pulled straight from the imagination of a local artist.

Every visitor paid for their own ticket. And they kept coming, all day long, every day of the week, all year round. That adds up to a staggering amount of money for a work that doesn't move, that's already finished, and that doesn't produce anything you could point to and measure for the people paying to see it. That money doesn't just pay artists while they're alive and keep the work maintained over time, it builds an entire ecosystem around it: cultural, touristic, economic. Ultimately, it becomes part of a country's heritage or even humanity's cultural and historical heritage, growing out of the piece itself and everything that springs up around it.

So certain works of art, the ones that become "great," whether because history decided so (like the Mona Lisa), because they capture something rare or hold a strange, immersive power (Park Güell in Spain, the White Temple in Thailand), because they mark a pivotal moment in human history (The Raft of the Medusa), because they sit at the heart of a culture (Picasso's Guernica), or simply because they're an extraordinary artistic achievement (all of the above) — and for countless other reasons tied to art and human nature, have the power to generate enormous sums of money, build an entire economy around themselves, and, over time, become part of our historical and cultural heritage.

For the simple pleasure of thinking it through, I find it striking that everything starts with the piece itself and that everything else grows up around it as secondary activity: infrastructure to receive the public, restaurants and bars in nearby towns, souvenir shops, museum staff, school trips, and so on. The quality of the art, the depth of the artistic vision, how deeply the artist was inspired, how devoted they were to their craft — all of this can eventually translate into economic value. A piece that serves no measurable function in society, that isn't even for sale in a gallery, still ends up so valuable that it reshapes the entire economic landscape around it, letting countless people make a living off its ripple effects.

The same goes for well-known natural or historical sites. Take Niagara Falls, or the Eiffel Tower, the "attractions," as we call them. These places and art share something essential: the power to transform us, to make us travel in time or within the depth of our human nature, to inspire us. They reach something deep inside us and open doors we didn't know were there, precisely because they're extraordinarily beautiful, or extraordinarily out of the ordinary, and because they still carry that mysterious, universal trace of the artist's inspiration that brought them into being.