I have had to deal with this issue in my line of work. I am a painter. When I first started out I thought that my work should go straight into museums so they could receive the respect they deserved. There they would be cared for and cherished as masterpieces. I also wasn't selling any work so it was easy to live in that fantasy world.
Within the last several years I have been fortunate to actually have sold a good number of paintings, and with that my attitude has had to change. I realize that once a painting has left my studio and goes to a collector I have no more control over it than if I released a bird out of the window. That collector can hang it in the living room of their house in a place of honor, or over their toilet (I have actually heard that one of my works is in a bathroom
) A lot of artists cannot come to terms with this reality, and they generally don't last long.
The way I look at it, I did my job. I produced a painting that satisfied me enough to show, and sell, and have my name on... and satisfied someone else enough to purchase it, for whatever reason.
Johnny Depp had a great response when an interviewer asked him if he worried about what was going to happen to a movie after he was finished making it. He said "That's not my job. My job is to show up and play the part. That is what they pay me for. Anything that happens after that is out of my hands."
My own mother did something recently that is along the same lines IMO as replacing an original shaft with an OB-1 or Predator. Twenty years or so I gave her one of my early paintings, a portrait with a lot of white on the canvas and a simple black wood frame that I put on myself. She decided that the black didn't go with her decor anymore so she took it to a frame shop to have a brown frame put on. I originally put a black frame on it for a specific aesthetic reason. They wanted to charge her an arm and leg for the job, so she did what she thought best, and got some brown paint and a brush. When I went to her house to see it she was so proud of the job she had done and how well it had turned out. Unfortunately she hadn't masked off the canvas, and there were brown paint marks along the edges of the painting surface itself. I just had to smile, shrug it off and tell her that she did a great job, and not to worry about those marks... the fact they were done by the artist's mother would only add to the paintings value.
The fact is that making paintings is an art, and making cues is an art, but they are also businesses. If an artist's work or a cuemaker's work is so precious to them that they can't let it go, then don't let it go. Keep it in your workshop or studio and admire it all day by yourself, no one is stopping you.
