Money, as the abstract form of value, was invented in Lydia about 2 ½ thousand years ago. The first standardised coins were minted by Croesus out of silver and gold. Prior to this, exchange occurred through useful products being swapped in equivalent proportions. Coins quickly caught on and Croesus became rich through his invention.
Gold was relatively useless stuff, not suitable for tool making or consuming. It became recognised as a universally valuable substance because it was a long-lasting metal with scarcity. Its value required an abstraction in the minds of its users which was based on a recognition of its value as a decoration, especially in sacred contexts. Its value depended on its social relativity.
Like gold, art is a socially constructed recognition of value. Human beings can survive without a sense of artistic quality but our cultures construct an artistic dimension to the things we use and how we otherwise define things as objects of use which we could do without. Food could be presented with less fuss if we did not have any socially-generated expectations. We could just eat the ingredients. Homes could be without decoration or style. Streets could be without sculptures, just full of cars. This is in fact the case in some places.
Culture constructs values to live for. Without this construction, life is reduced to nothingness. This is the meaning of the existentialist identification of being and nothingness. There is no purpose to life, unless we create it. This is the inventive power of human spirit. The challenge is to create cultural values worth living for.
In the same way which we attribute value to gold and money, we attribute value to artworks. Culture can resist functionalist tendencies to reduce all life to minimal operations. Through belonging to cultures, qualities can be established which overcome the tendency to despair about the fundamental meaninglessness of everything.
Likewise, programming can be reduced to its bare minimal functionality. The programmer as artist enjoys the task of raising a useful software product to an artwork to create meaning for its users.

see: “The History of Money”, Jack Weatherford