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Gold isn't useless, it's great for decoration, jewelry and small sculptures. For instance, because it's so malleable, you can easily turn it into a sheet and ap
by alricb 11y ago
Gold isn't useless, it's great for decoration, jewelry and small sculptures. For instance, because it's so malleable, you can easily turn it into a sheet and apply it to a sculpture, as the Greeks did.
We don't usually think of decoration as something that's worth a lot of money, but that's partly because we have access to so many cheap organic pigments. Before the 19th century, natural pigments could be very expensive and societies spent a lot of money on them (like the Greeks who painted and gold-plated their statues).
- kcl 11y agoAncient Greece is still an age or two away. I am interested in your pigment argument, however. If I get into specifics about what makes gold good art I'll check into that. It would be interesting to look into, say, the price of gold versus purple dye in Ancient Rome.
- jolhoeft 11y agoThe classic example of this is ultramarine blue in the Renaissance. Typically cost three times its weight in gold. Painters often had to have their patrons supply the ultramarine if they wanted blue in their painting. Having a very blue painting was naturally a status symbol.
- tosseraccount 11y ago"The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarcely anything; scarcely anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarcely any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it." -Adam Smith , from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
- thaumasiotes 11y ago> We don't usually think of decoration as something that's worth a lot of money The fashion and jewelry industries might disagree.
- IkmoIkmo 11y agoThat's not really true. Gold is used in decoration because it's expensive. i.e., it's use as a status symbol derives from its costliness primarily, not the other way around. Aluminium had a similar status, at one point it was used for decorating the most fancy things, it was a show of wealth and power and more expensive than gold or silver. If you had aluminium cutlery, you were the bomb. Then they were able to produce aluminium cheaply, instead of mine the small amounts that naturally exist. It became dirt cheap, and thereby lost its status. Was it any less decorative? No. The cutlery still looked the same. It became uninteresting to use aluminium not because it became ugly, but because it became cheap. Same with gold. Yes we sorta-kinda like shiny things, but we don't like the gold apple watch the best because we like the tacky golden color so much, we like it because we all know it's expensive. There are lots of pretty metals, pretty colours etc, it's not what gives gold its value. Of course gold isn't useless, it has industrial applications and indeed artistic applications as you mention. But what is clear as day, is that it trades at a value that far exceeds this use, at a value that can't be explained by its functional utility alone.
- dragonwriter 11y agoA minor nitpick: aluminum was mined before and after it became cheap, what made it cheap was improvement in the process of refining the mined ore into pure aluminum, not that it was suddenly "produced cheaply" instead of "mining the limited amounts that naturally exist".
- IkmoIkmo 11y agothanks
- agumonkey 11y agoBut gold isn't just great, it made massive amount of people crazy. Is it the color that tickles our brain much more than red green or blue ? ...