Taking Inventory: Painting

Humans have probably been painting since before they were called humans. Most cave paintings date from the Paleolithic period (25,000–8,000 BCE), but some are much older or much younger. Researchers studying the Gabarnmung cave in northern Australia found that the oldest rock art there was produced more than 28,000 years ago, but the youngest was less than a century old.

Earlier this year, a study claimed an age of 64,000 years for one of the oldest examples of cave art in Spain. That’s 20,000 years before humans arrived in Europe, so it must have been created by Neanderthals. Engraved shells created by another of our humanoid predecessors, Homo erectus, dates as far back as 500,000 years. But just like with video games, experts disagree on whether these engravings can be properly classified as ‘art’.

It’s thought that painting was first developed for utility – they likely existed to show how to do something, or where something was. Some believe they were also used in ritual – that animals were painted to “catch” their souls and make them easier to hunt. Some even think that they were used as calendars. Since then, art has fragmented into many different strands – from sculpture, to industrial design (the shape of a chair, for example), to photojournalism, to “fine art” – which is appreciated chiefly for its aesthetic, imaginative or intellectual content.

Today, art is a huge industry which feeds into many different parts of society and was worth about $63 billion in 2017. But mostly it’s still about making beautiful and meaningful things, so if you’ve ever tried to make your Minecraft house and its surroundings look a little nicer, or thought carefully about what colour you’d like your herd of sheep to be, then you get to call yourself an artist. Sacré bleu!