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Robin Hood

Humans invented art 40,000 years before we invented money

Weโ€™ve never needed monetary motivation to do beautiful things

and we never will

20 comments
unlofl [Promoted Toot]

@robinhood solid point, but bold to assume humans invented art.

Atomic Fox

@unlofl @robinhood

I've invented a lot of things that I wasn't the first inventor of.

Gives me some confidence that I'm not totally insane, from time to time.

The Shimmering Spectrum

@robinhood I don't need money to motivate me to do art. I need money to pay rent so I can keep doing art.

Morgan

@ShimmeringSpectrum @robinhood me too, that's why I get so annoyed at the "but if we had UBI no one would ever do anything!" crowd. I don't make very much money off my art (usually none), so how much art I can do is limited. If I didn't need to struggle to survive, I'd be making so much art! Hell, I'd dabble in engineering if I could afford the materials!

๐ŸŒฟMouse-Friend๐ŸŒฟ

@robinhood *495,000 years before the invention of currency
Just to really drive home the incredibly tiny amount of time money has existed. And that's giving a very generous 5,000 years where money in some form kind of existed at all (which is, itself, an overestimation of how long money has existed).

๐ŸŒฟMouse-Friend๐ŸŒฟ

@robinhood for those who will ask:
~500,000 years ago some pre-Sapien hominids in Zambia were making pigment intentionally. That is, by our understanding, the oldest evidence of human art because unless you're using the pigment For something, it's very unlikely you'd spend the time to Make it.
Plus there are some lines drawn in red ochre that are only a few 10s of thousands of years newer than the Zambia find.

nota ๐Ÿฆˆโœจ

@mousefriend @robinhood yeah, economist types really love severely overstating how long money has existed

Sure, there's a long history of items that were probably used as some kind of voucher or token. But I don't think there's any evidence of them being used in any way that would resemble a currency.

Also the idea of bartering as a precursor to money isn't real either. Zero evidence for it, just something some guy made up. The closest you get is the general concept of owing someone a favor.

Dan Seitz

@robinhood

And yet even back then they were expected to work for exposure, by which I mean if nobody liked their art they were abandoned in the woods to die.

Art world's tough.

Sophie
@pascoda
@Robin Hood
Good thinking, but still artists need to be paid for their art to be able to support themselves... :winking_face_with_tongue:
InarticulateQuilter

@robinhood itโ€™s posts like this that make me wish there was such a thing as a super boost so more people can see important points like this

solo

@robinhood to be fair, "money" is a useful concept to have in order to facilitate the exchange of goods

capitalism on the other hand? that's a whole different story.

solo

@robinhood oh wait, you're talking more about the motivational side of it

yeah, people don't need to be motivated by money to produce art
so long as they have a basic level subsistence and access to the shit they need to make the art, then artists will make art without monetary incentive

aspragg

@robinhood Not only do humans make art when there is no chance of receiving money for doing so, they make art when it is literally *illegal* to do so. Humans will risk jail or even death to keep making art.

Floating Point Error

@robinhood or doing deliberately ugly and meaningless things no one could pay for even in the presence of money!

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