Based on the previous text, its ideas and its linguistic asp...

        We do not know how art began any more than we know how language started. If we take art to mean such activities as building temples and houses, making pictures and sculptures, or weaving patterns, there is no people in all the world without art. If, on the other hand, we mean by art some kind of beautiful luxury, something to enjoy in museums and exhibitions or something special to use as a precious decoration in the best parlour, we must realize that this use of the word is a very recent development. We can best understand this difference if we think of architecture. There is scarcely any building in the world which was not erected for a particular purpose. Those who use these buildings as places of worship or entertainment, or as dwellings, judge them first and foremost by standards of utility. But apart from this, they may like or dislike the design or the proportions of the structure, and appreciate the efforts of the good architect to make it not only practical but right. In the past the attitude to paintings and statues was often similar. They were not thought of as mere works of art but as objects which had a definite function.

         Similarly, we are not likely to understand the art of the past if we are quite ignorant of the aims it had to serve. The further we go back in history, the more definite but also the more strange are the aims which art was supposed to serve. The same applies if we leave towns and cities and go to the peasants or, better still, if we travel to the peoples whose ways of life still resemble the conditions in which our remote ancestors lived. Among them there is no difference between building and image-making as far as usefulness is concerned. Their huts are there to shelter them from rain, wind and sunshine and the spirits which produce them; images are made to protect them against other powers which are, to them, as real as the forces of nature. Pictures and statues, in other words, are used to work magic.

E. H. Gombrich. The story of art.

New York, Phaidon, 2024. 16th ed. p. 9-10 (adapted).