Why Do Humans Make Art —And What’s The Point?

Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash

It’s a question mankind has been asking itself since some meathead in a dark cave 50,000 years ago started banging rocks together to annoy his neighbour.

To aid with the narrative here, let’s call the neighbour, Fred Flintstone, and the hapless drummer, Barney Rubble.

Fred bangs loudly on Barney’s door. ‘Turn that racket down!’

‘Why?’ replies Barney. ‘Don’t you like it?

‘No, I don’t. Sounds like a load of rocks being smashed together to me. Why don’t you get a job?

Ah, so we’re back to jobs again. My favourite subject.

But let’s take this a bit further for a minute, and imagine that in this hypothetical prehistoric world, Barney heeds Fred’s advice and gets a job. Packs his rocks away, schleps his hairy ass down to the Labour Exchange and picks up a low paid job filleting dinosaur bones.

But what happens now? What about causality? What happens if all the prehistoric Barneys had packed away their drum-rocks and got jobs. Would The Renaissance have ever happened? Would Shakespeare have penned A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Would Led Zeppelin have written Stairway To Heaven? Would Van Gogh have ever painted anything?

The answer is yes — you can see it above in the photo. Because even if this…