The Prisoner was the ultimate cult hit: a TV series about a secret agent who is kidnapped and held captive in the mysterious village ... He is Number 6, and from the village there is no escape: ‘I am not a number; I am a free man’. Dominic Sandbrook: Let Us Entertain You IV: Me, Myself & I
Social mobility brought with it a growing tension between the individual and the collective. ibid.
The ’70s marked a watershed in the battle for sexual equality. ibid.
We have been tasked to find and protect buildings, monuments and art. The Monuments Men 2014 starring George Clooney & Matt Damon & Cate Blanchett & Bill Murray & John Goodman & Jean Dujadrin & Bob Balaban & Hugh Bonneville & Sam Hazeldine & Dimitri Leonidas et al, director George Clooney
It’s exactly what we’re fighting for – for our culture and for our way of life ... But if you destroy their achievements and their history then it’s like they never existed. ibid. Clooney to men
There were over five million pieces recovered. ibid.
In the autumn of 1966 The Beatles were working in the studio on a new song Strawberry Fields Forever … At the end of the same month Jonathan Miller’s controversial adaptation of Alice in Wonderland was broadcast by the BBC … In popular culture and mass media it had been a year of restless stylistic experiment and the search for new forms of expression. Arena: 1966 – Thirty Years Ago Today: The Year the Decade Exploded, BBC 2016
‘They are anti-war, and they’re love everybody, and their sexual lives have become freer. The kids are looking for something else, or some different moral value.’ ibid. Mick Jagger
‘Nobody thought we were going to come out of it alive. Most kids of my age didn’t expect to make it through the ’60s.’ ibid. Steve Gibbons, The Ugly’s vocalist
‘The music is the only living thing. Draft only those over forty. It’s their war; let them kill each other.’ ibid. Lou Reed, The Velvet Underground
‘This [LSD] can by psychological dynamite.’ ibid. Fyfe Robertson
You’ve seen them, haven’t you, those guys with the big beards and the lumberjacky clothes. And you’ve probably got a word for them too – you probably call them hipsters but you don’t necessarily know it … united by a love of buying real things; they’re very keen on food … It’s supposed to be authentic and real … but big business has got in on the act … This is a film about hipsters. Peter York’s Hipster Handbook, BBC 2017
Hi, I’m in black and white this week, depressed, life is hopeless, death is a constant, all accident is futile wherever you go; you can’t be certain you’re not just going nowhere: this is nihilism, to believe in nothing. Matthew Collings, Hello Culture: Nihilism, Channel 4 2001
Nihilism: it’s the really big ISM of the 20th century. ibid.
Every age has its own apocalypse fantasy. ibid.
Gericault: The Raft of the Medusa. ibid.
Nihilism rejects everything even its own. ibid.
Nihilists see existence as irrational and meaningless. ibid.
Beckett: The master of seeing everything so clearly it might make you commit suicide … He sees the utter reality of the meaningless of everything, but, well, he loves language. ibid.
This is a king of inner circle of great cultural figures who are bad. Matthew Collings, Hello Culture: Badness
Really what artists are interested in is the fakery of people’s attitudes. ibid.
Lord Byron: he lived a life of shocking immorality … shunned by society. ibid.
Rolling Stones: no-one was more clever with words, or sexier with music, or amusingly wasted on stage as they were. ibid.
Cultural badness always gets rewarded in the end. ibid.
Famous black magic bald guy – the Beast 666 … He took the message of Lucifer worldwide. ibid.
[Marquis] de Sade: Cruelty is the first sentiment imprinted into us by Nature. ibid.
Jerry Lee Lewis became famous … Jerry was brought up to believe in sin and redemption. ibid.
Charles Manson’s family murdered five people staying in the house … The murderers were hippies on acid. ibid.
It’s the route to another world; it’s consciousness explored. Matthew Collings, Hello Culture: Madness
Mad art on the other hand is always outside of history … You can’t really take the madness out of Van Gogh. ibid.
Blake took over the role of family vision-seer when he was five … Blake only became famous after his death. ibid.
This programme is about the cult of celebrity; it’s about the loss of values we have now … The rich and the successful rule. Matthew Collings, Hello Culture: Celebrity
David Bowie: he’s our modern version of Byron’s act, where celebrity is something weightless and taken on and taken off again. ibid.
Success is a value we admire apparently more than any other. ibid.
Warhol is a 1960s figure, artist, a celebrity icon … He de-personalised the faces of the famous. ibid.
I’ve always felt at home in the past. For after all what is the present except an endless chain of memories? Some of them are translated into stone. We are all the inheritors of those memories. And we look after them as best we can. All this so we can pass on their revelation to the future. Simon Schama, Civilisations I: Second Moment of Creation, BBC 2018
The significance of Palmyra was at once both local and universal. ibid.
We know what civilisation is: we know it from the shock of its imminent loss as a mutilation on the body of our humanity. ibid.
We are the art-making animal. ibid.
When did it begin that second moment of creation, the dawning of human creativity? Where did it begin? ibid.
Europe’s first great civilisation: the culture of the Minoans … This is the first truly social art the world had seen. ibid.
The Nabataeans had what you might call an instinct for cultural ecology; they worked with the rock in their desert home … This is Petra. ibid.
A garden city of fountains, swimming pools, groves and orchards … A city of 30,000 people … A cosmopolitan playground. ibid.
Mayan art and architecture was a prayer – an appeal to the weather … But Mayan art wasn’t all enormous and formal – far from it – it was hugely varied. One of the most spectacular flourishing of creativity in human history. ibid.
All civilisations want what they can’t have – the conquest of time. ibid.
Tabasco State Mexico: There are many places where you can come face to face with the ancient world. But I have to say this is hard to beat. This colossal stone head is almost 3,000 years old. Mary Beard, Civilisations II: How Do We Look
When civilisations first made art they made it about us. ibid.
One of the most distinctive things about the Athenian culture was an intense focus on a youthful athletic body. ibid.
Terracotta Army: The biggest tableau of sculpture made anywhere in the planet ever. ibid.
This is the figure of Ramesses II who ruled Egypt around 1200 BC. He was the pharaoh who invested more in his image than any other. His figure is found all over Egypt. ibid.
The Boxer: The body beautiful was not so very far from the body brutalised. ibid.
A barometer of civilisation itself. ibid.
When your world is collapsing, when everything is closing in, what you want is to be somewhere else, somewhere you can breathe in peace, a scrap of beauty far from the noise and the ugliness. But if there is no escape then you get there in your dreams and you paint that landscape into existence. Simon Schama, Civilisations III: Picturing Paradise
Landscape art has always been an antidote to the anarchy brought by the hand of man. ibid.
The Chinese tradition landscape painting first blossomed as a great subject of art. ibid.
In 1565 the Flemish master Peter Bruegel painted a set of landscapes which reinvented that traditional medieval cycle – the labours of the months. ibid.
A new class of jobbing artists emerged to service this popular demand for landscape art. ibid.
Angkor Wat: It’s religious art at its most spectacular. Mary Beard, Civilisations IV: The Eye of Faith
For millennia, art has been used to bring the human and divine together. And it’s given us some of the most majestic and affecting visual images ever made. ibid.
How can a perfect and indivisible God give up a part of himself to create a son? … Were Jesus and God made of the same substance? ibid.
Islam is absolutely not an artless religion. ibid.