It's still "just" a kind of art. It's not going to let us populate a new planet or harvest space minerals. Art is valuable but the point of the person you're responding to still stands.
Making one vial of perfume is art. Making millions needs some complicated chemical and logistic apparatus behind it.
And art does make technology evolve. History of art is constrained by the techniques and products available at the time. Painters have always chased elusive colors and chemists have strived to give them what they wanted for cheap prices.
The convenience of going to a modern paint shop and getting pretty much any color you want is a modern luxury.
Art would most definitely help us populate a new planet or harvest space materials. It paves the way, quite literally, in the imagination to even understand it might be possible and the implications of such.
Additionally, a society that has no meaningful manner of media, culture, or expression sounds exactly like the sort of stuff that art has been exploring for decades. It’s usually not portrayed as some sort of utilitarian utopia though...
