Art Critics in the Stone Age
In the stone-age world that I am building, I don't just want one-dimensional characters who are either hunters or gatherers. I want a great quantity of people including those who would have become art critics if born in recent times.
Here is some output from an art critic:
In Sebastian Gögel's and Laurence De Leersnyder's work, matter primes upon form. As these artists explore it, matter appears to be a memory that refreshes itself following its moods. It is surface where gesture becomes inscribed, residual trace of a past phenomenon, manifestation of a symptom. It contains this evident mystery of shape in the making, like the diffuse anxiety of something that has not been entirely spoken. The Germans speak of Stimmung to describe this sens similar to connotation, at the fringe of enunciation. https://nickyhamlyn.com/art-gobbledegook/
Question
Given that humans were as intelligent in the stone-age as we are now - they were homo sapiens after all - What function would art-critic types have fulfilled in hunter-gathering days?
Clarification
I wasn't suggesting that there would necessarily be art-critics in the stone-age. Given that we are the same species as stone-age people, there must have been a wide range of interests, abilities and temperaments in those days. I'm wondering what today's art-critic types would have found to occupy themselves in more primitive times. How would that sort of person survive - what would they have done - why weren't they eliminated by evolution?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/139445. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Art-critic types would fulfill meat gathering roles and such.
Imagine that someone prefers to write books for a living, they'd go get a job digging holes if they couldn't afford to eat or clothe themselves. Simple as.
If they were about survival back then (which they very much were) then there was no place for art critics.
Update
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to, but I think it's sort of what you'd call 'mindset'. You usually suit people to particular jobs based on their personality. You're getting at 'What did people with that mindset do back then?', and my answer would be that they didn't, because they didn't really exist back then.
I cannot begin to imagine what society was like back then, but I doubt that sort of personality existed. Or if they did, they'd be a lot more analytical in their methods, but probably less pratical. One thing for sure is that they weren't getting picked to breed with, only the strongest and effective would be picked.
These sorts of personalities probably started to come about as society allowed them. Moving from the stone age into the bronze age, there would have been a lot more artisians who crafted and such, which is a different mindset to a warrior for example. A good swordsmith would earn you money, and the switch for breeding changed from meat to money, and so those sorts of people would become more prevalent.
I guess it's hard to consider, but think about yourself growing up. What are were you good at and what did you want to be when you were older? Someone back then would not have thought that way, and it was only when society started to come in an the existence of professions that you could say different types of people started to emerge.
An art critic is very general, but they fall into the analytical mindset, so stuff like furniture making, and things with a nack for detail they'd be good at.
Since then, we've become a lot more 'creative' and such, and now there is a strong desire for more intellectuals to find newer and better technology and solutions to the worlds problems.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/139458. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads