ti-legacy.com

I think you should be able to view the general Ed desc of most items, with the Appraise command. Particularly for paintings, someone can't get a good look at the paintings being sold in a shop unless they buy the painting, or the artist opens the back door and brings it out for them to see.

This can be worked around by cloning the extended to the @shop_info special extended.

Shop info is designed for this, and gives the merchant control over what should be visible without buying the item.