> Apparently, money is meaningless. I am not going to argue in favour of the banana. But I am going to argue in favour of (expensive) art. If I had only $10 a

> Apparently, money is meaningless. I am not going to argue in favour of the banana. But I am going to argue in favour of (expensive) art. If I had only $10 and $1 would buy me food and shelter, then I would pay $9 for a Monet or van Gogh. Why? Because if I never see or possess an actual Monet or van Gogh, how can I verify things about the past? How can I verify anything? How can I have a physical and complete connection to the past? To take a more historic example, if anything new (and real) about the man called Jesus is discovered, it would be equally valuable to nonreligous people as to religous people. Suppose for a moment that you find Jesus's diary and in it he wrote: "Can people please stop writing four separate accounts of how I am the messiah; I am not." Wouldn't the change that would bring about be more significant than the amounts of money spent in various contexts? For the record, I don't think the Jesus example matters much in 2019. But back in the Renaissance, our connection to the past (and the past's knowledge) was critical. Maybe Euclid's elements is not "art" to you but it sure as hell should be preserved as though it were art. Art and artifacts are to history as experimentation is to science.