For the Maori of New Zealand, the thing given has a spirit (Hau). The obligation to reciprocate comes from the very nature of the thing given which, far from being inert and passive, is said to be endowed with a "spirit" that weighs upon the recipient like an external force, until it compels him to give in return.
According to this theory, the "spirit of the thing given" originates in the trace that individuals leave on the objects of the various forms of exchange.

The artist leaves the same imprint by handling the material of his own work.
Although our world today is governed by the use of money, art ought to manage to free itself at least in part from the logic of accumulating wealth, in order to rise to a different role: to become a field in which mutual trust between human beings can be tried out.
I am not willing to see myself reflected in the lie about money that is told to me every day. I believe the artist is bound to think differently, and this is why I perform this useless gesture - so that it may sprout in time and give us something new.
If you cannot see the sense or the use of it, we are on the right track.
The interest that this senseless uselessness manages to arouse is the very energy that drives me to keep working without pause.

It is a fact that if everyone gave according to their means, most of the world's problems would be solved; and if we were then certain that giving a hundred would bring back a thousand, we would spend most of our time looking for a present for someone - if only by getting rid of what is ours and of no use to us.
We know that the six faces of a die have the same probability of coming up at every throw; if we throw a die a million times, we know that the six faces will come up in equal numbers. And yet, if we throw the die only once, we still think the result is random.
Life itself is an apparently random gift, and yet there are those who spend the whole of it trying to poison other people's, hoarding for themselves whatever they can take from their neighbours, living in the fear of losing everything.
Rome, 01/2023

The gift is a total social fact, based on the principle of reciprocity, which implies a large measure of freedom. It is true that there is an obligation to give in return, but the ways and the timing are not rigid, and in any case it is a moral obligation, not actionable at law nor open to sanction. The value of the gift lies in the absence of guarantees for the giver - an absence that presupposes great trust in others.
Marcel Mauss (The Gift, 1923)

In place of the gift system used by so-called primitive peoples, the world we live in has chosen the lottery system: a great many losers for one winner.
The lottery paradigm is applied to lotteries and scratch cards, to gambling in general, but also to everything else: cultural, artistic and television prizes, risky investments, cryptocurrencies, schooling, entertainment, universities, sport, and so on.
To work, a lottery needs a very large group of certain losers, willing to risk a little money for a great (and virtually impossible) gain.
The system works if the participants involved - who often involve themselves, through the hope of being the lucky one for once - are numerous enough.
The lottery paradigm is widespread in many fields. It concerns the possibility of winning, that is, of having a single winner and a great many losers; everyone bets on this, hoping to be the winner. Capitalism makes no provision for a fair distribution of income for precisely this reason: everyone wants to know that they deserve more than the others, even while they slave away for next to nothing.
The merit of winning also belongs to the paradigm that is apparently the opposite of the lottery: meritocracy. This presents itself as a system that would reward those who deserve to be rewarded while in fact it works by the same rules as the lottery, with the aggravating factor of corruption and favouritism of every kind. These exploit the fact that many fields are known only to the specialists within them, or that the line between deserving and undeserving is very blurred, so that merit ends up being defined arbitrarily, with no one able to check whether the choice was sound or not.
In his inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1767-1773), it is Adam Smith himself who points out to us that:
"The world neither ever saw, nor ever will see, a perfectly fair lottery; or one in which the whole gain compensated the whole loss; because the undertaker could make nothing by it. In the state lotteries the tickets are really not worth the price which is paid by the original subscribers, and yet commonly sell in the market for twenty, thirty, and sometimes forty per cent. advance."
"The vain hope of gaining some of the great prizes is the sole cause of this demand. The soberest people scarce look upon it as a folly to pay a small sum for the chance of gaining ten or twenty thousand pounds; though they know that even that small sum is perhaps twenty or thirty per cent. more than the chance is worth."

Every year we give away a painting - see how!