If we think we’ve still got civilisation, what do we think it is? Is it old monuments from the past lingering on? Matthew Collings, This is Civilisation I: Ye Gods, BBC 2007
Art of our time: Is it about how civilised or uncivilised we are now? ibid.
It’s about what art can do that history can’t exactly do. What’s the point of a legacy of art? ibid.
Art tells us something about what we think we are, and what we could be if we were better than ourselves. ibid.
What is civilisation? Civilisation is what we do in order to not be at a basic, murdering, devouring, purely appetite-driven level of existence. ibid.
It is life. It is our imaginative proposal of what life can be. I’m going to be looking at civilisation through art. ibid.
The Ancient Greeks carved their gods to look like themselves, like people. ibid.
The Greeks are always looking over their shoulder at what everyone else is doing. ibid.
The Elgin Marbles, removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in the 19th century and brought to England. ibid.
Greek culture brings is self-awareness, self-scrutiny, self-defining. The Greeks question what society can be. ibid.
Christian art appears … Primitive Christian art is already existing symbols appropriated. ibid.
Civilisation is what we do to not just be our basic appetite-driven selves. It’s the higher realm. It’s people talking to each other through the objects and monuments they leave for future generations. Matthew Collings, This is Civilisation II: Feelings
Art does what the history books can’t do: it shows us what civilisations of the past yearned for. What we can be if we were better than ourselves. ibid.
We like it when art is about feeling … We are going to meet two great 18th century artists who were in on that: the French painter David and the Spanish painter Goya. They both lived through the explosion of the French Revolution and the fallout from it. ibid.
David and Goya depict the new startling world of human emotion … Their art is our witness. ibid.
For David and Goya, Renaissance art is the first glimmering of a change in human consciousness. From faith to reason. And reason releases feeling. ibid.
Before Giotto the heavenly beings of religious art have been flat symbolic beings for a thousand years. With Giotta they’re rounded, they’re physical, they have human life. ibid.
Goya and David are interested in humanity. How do you picture it? The Renaissance does it with a single face. ibid.
Leonard da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Her appeal is not that she’s divine but that she’s human. ibid.
In his paintings done in the five years leading up to the French Revolution, David shows Ancient Greeks and Romans being patriotic and sacrificing themselves for society. ibid.
David’s pictures also show personal darkness, his feelings of resentment against authority. ibid.
See David’s mind whirring: Renaissance opened a door for him to appreciate the art of the ancient past. This noble way of life he thinks is an attack on the corruption of life now … David takes Renaissance space and makes it menacing. ibid.
When the French Revolution comes in 1789, Jacques Louis David was made its official artist. ibid.
The art of Francisco Goya, the Spanish counterpart to David. David mirrors man’s noble soul, Goya descends into the subterranean depths. Goya in the 1790s is the moment when the artist doesn’t just paint what he’s told, he also paints his own imagination: the unasked for, the uncomfortable, the unwanted. ibid.
Goya and his circle dream of revolutionary values coming to Spain … The dream turns to a nightmare. ibid.
Goya is a liberal progressive, a man of the enlightenment. He doesn’t just deplore humanity’s dark side – he is the great tireless explorer of it … Goya becomes the prophet of the new scariness about human destiny. ibid.
The art of feeling. Feeling gone wrong. Francisco Goya sleeps in his studio. Nightmares coming out of his head. ibid.
Both David and Goya are about heightened feeling. ibid.
We have a humour based on despair. ibid.
Empty, unhinged, distorted: unknown forces greater than ourselves are shaping us to be something we don’t feel we really are, something unnatural. Matthew Collings, This is Civilisation III: Save Our Souls
This feeling of catastrophe isn’t really unique to modern life. ibid.
We feel we are losing our individuality, our creativity, we feel meaningless. Tonight we’re going to meet a Victorian who thought he could fight that process, that civilisation could rise again … He is an art guru: John Ruskin. His life’s work is about the power of art to save our souls. Ruskin was a great battling critical mind. He taught Victorians to see clearly, and through that to understand what they could be, they were better than themselves. ibid.
We’re looking at the redeeming power of art. Art is not just a distraction from the gruelling trip of life, it is life. It is our imaginative proposal of what art could be. ibid.
Ruskin is the prophet of why art matters. ibid.
In the 1840s John Ruskin put art, man and nature together … The man who fires up Ruskin to become the guru of the age was the great landscape painter J M W Turner. Turner paints nature … the emotion of that experience. He paint’s nature’s power. ibid.
In the late stages of his art, Turner has gone on to a new level, elemental, powerful, yet sublime. ibid.
It’s Ruskin who rescues Turner’s reputation. Ibid.
In the late stages of his art, Turner has gone on to a new level, elemental, powerful, yet sublime. ibid.
It’s Ruskin who rescues Turner’s reputation. Ibid.
Ruskin is the guy who comes up with the idea of a bad Renaissance instead of a good one … Renaissance bad, Gothic good. ibid.
The soullessness of the social results of Victorian commercialism – he [Ruskin] thinks works is part of life. It shouldn’t deaden you, it should fulfil you. ibid.
Ruskin damned the factories where man is cut off from himself. ibid.
Pre-Raphaelite style: These artists present Ruskin’s revolutionary social ideas in the form of metaphors – nature is the main one … The Pre-Raphaelites all read Ruskin’s books and absorbed the idea that reality is changing in ways that seem inhumane. ibid.
In the 1850s it was modern art. ibid.
[William] Moriss’s designs are based on his own observations: leaves, flowers and stems … A highly original mixture of visual harmony and complexity. ibid.
1859: The most famous art trial in history: Whistler v Ruskin. ibid.
Impressionism is all about the texture of modern life. New entertainments, new suburban pleasures. ibid.
Greek statues in the first millennium BC. They are offerings to the gods … Beings in the shape of men, they are reflected back to man an idealised version of himself. Matthew Collings, This is Civilisation IV: Uncertainty
Modern art in a museum: our version of the Delphic Oracle. How can we know ourselves with this? ibid.
The burning issue tonight, the big thing that modern art tells us right from its beginning up to now, is that something broke 100 years ago that cannot be put back together again. There is no single code for living. The burning issue for us is uncertainty. ibid.
Market forces have made modern art popular. Now Tate Modern gets 5 million visitors a year. ibid.
Hitler’s Degenerate Art Show highlights in a peculiarly horrific, bizarre and sick way something that’s been there all along with modern a art – its deliberate outsidedness, its refusal to be normal. ibid.