Civilisations BBC 2

[Richard Tarleton]

Don't worry Richard; it hasn't.

[Richard Tarleton]

Hmmm. Not sure about last night's prog. With his breathless, relentlessly emphatic delivery, as if he'd just climbed a long flight of stairs (as indeed he had at one point), Simon Schama is gradually morphing into Dan Cruikshank . His initial premise about the drawing and colour dichotomy - Florence and Venice - was new to me, but I was confused by his example of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. Ariadne was in blue, which was significant apparently as it was in contrast to "Bacchus's gang" [sic] who were in greens and browns. But...but...one of Bacchus's gang was also in blue, was she not? There it was, staring us in the face. Odd.

Stranger still was his discussion of Goya's Pilgrimage of St Isidro, which we last heard discussed, strangely enough, in Tom McKinney's BAL on the Concierto de Aranjuez, which was also odd. Schama purported to find the face of Napoleon staring out of the crowd (click on the link) - which left me once again reaching for Robert Hughes, to whom this had not occured. Which is not to say that it's therefore not possible, but I'd respectfully suggest this is nonsense, it's just one of the hideous faces staring out of the crowd. What on earth would Napoleon be doing participating in the Pilgrimage of St Isidro? Robert Hughes also discusses "Saturn Devouring his Son" [as the painting is generally known] at some length - "the gory cadaver may be a son or a daughter, its gender is undecidable" (though not to Schama, who tells us firmly it is a daughter). Hughes goes on: "There is also a theory that depends on identifying Saturn's child as female. If it is, then Goya may have meant the eating of the daughter by her father as a match to the scene next to it: Judith's murder of the patriarchal Holofernes". So there we are: it's debateable, it's just a theory, and it's complicated, and may be linked to the original context of the Black Paintings.

This sort of thing undermines my confidence in the whole: it's superficial and glib. Disappointing.

[Serial_Apologist]

Hmmm. Not sure about last night's prog. With his breathless, relentlessly emphatic delivery, as if he'd just climbed a long flight of stairs (as indeed he had at one point), Simon Schama is gradually morphing into Dan Cruikshank . His initial premise about the drawing and colour dichotomy - Florence and Venice - was new to me, but I was confused by his example of Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne. Ariadne was in blue, which was significant apparently as it was in contrast to "Bacchus's gang" [sic] who were in greens and browns. But...but...one of Bacchus's gang was also in blue, was she not? There it was, staring us in the face. Odd.

Stranger still was his discussion of Goya's Pilgrimage of St Isidro, which we last heard discussed, strangely enough, in Tom McKinney's BAL on the Concierto de Aranjuez, which was also odd. Schama purported to find the face of Napoleon staring out of the crowd (click on the link) - which left me once again reaching for Robert Hughes, to whom this had not occured. Which is not to say that it's therefore not possible, but I'd respectfully suggest this is nonsense, it's just one of the hideous faces staring out of the crowd. What on earth would Napoleon be doing participating in the Pilgrimage of St Isidro? Robert Hughes also discusses "Saturn Devouring his Son" [as the painting is generally known] at some length - "the gory cadaver may be a son or a daughter, its gender is undecidable" (though not to Schama, who tells us firmly it is a daughter). Hughes goes on: "There is also a theory that depends on identifying Saturn's child as female. If it is, then Goya may have meant the eating of the daughter by her father as a match to the scene next to it: Judith's murder of the patriarchal Holofernes". So there we are: it's debateable, it's just a theory, and it's complicated, and may be linked to the original context of the Black Paintings.

This sort of thing undermines my confidence in the whole: it's superficial and glib. Disappointing.

I'm probably the only person on this forum who actually rather likes Dan Cruickshank! As compared to Schama's increasingly hectoring "I know best" manner, Cruikshank adopts a come-closer, look at this I've discovered sense of almost child-like mystery in his whispery delivery, which kind of invites one in.

But I have to agree with you on the conjectural basis on which SS's presentations would often appear to be based.

[Richard Tarleton]

Final episode last night - I suspect S_A and I were the only ones still watching. The whole series came across more than ever as an enormous category error - as The Times critic (who actually liked it) puts it today, "I bet the BBC wishes it had just called it something else". Because it wasn't about civilizations at all (any more than Kenneth Clark's was about civilization singular), it was almost entirely about the plastic arts, with a bit of architecture thrown in - not even "the arts", which include music, literature, poetry, drama and lots of other stuff.

Schama's peroration unintentionally summed up the problem: "...and that's why people come to see it [art, that is], in galleries and museums []....Civilization is such a grand word, but as I think we've seen its true strength lies in simple gifts...[pots, rugs, paintings, marks on walls...]....as it does in mighty buildings. And those things spring less from the demands of state and the status hungry rich, as they do from the unruly urges of gifted artists...to make something for everyone....those things are not dependent on the fate of mighty empires, whether moneyed or military....I think they will stick around as unmistakeable evidence of the liberated thought, acute vision and unquenchable fire of our shared humanity".

"The status hungry rich" and "the demands of state" actually paid for a lot of the stuff he showed us in his own chosen examples - Velazquez? Beethoven (whom he didn't mention) had patrons, who gave him the freedom to compose. Bach (likewise) the format of whose output was determined by his employers at the time? "The fate of mighty empires", "something for everyone" - my thoughts turned immediately to another of his own examples, Goya, whose work was informed by the fate of a mighty empire, and whose greatest and grimmest works were not for anyone other than himself, paintings on the walls of his house which he could not necessarily have expected anyone else to ever see.

It was a series about the visual arts. "Civilization" is, for starters, about all sorts of things - how society is ordered, how it makes a living, what it considers important, its physical environment and climate (Maya - jungles, Inca - mountains, Mesopotamia - agriculture, whatever...) which lay well outside the scope of this series. Jared Diamond's books on the rise and fall of various civilizations hardly touch on art.....Actually Mary Beard, in her much criticised episode on religion, probably came closest to tackling larger themes.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Oh, I've been watching - and, yes, I wish they'd called this series of individual essays on the relationship between visual Art (mainly) and Cultural identity something else. Taken as such a series, I seem to have got a lot more enjoyment (indeed, "inspiration") from it than you did, RT - but I feel I ought to say that your criticisms and corrections of individual points-of-fact have been as useful to me as codicils to each programme, so for that:

[Richard Tarleton]

but I feel I ought to say that your criticisms and corrections of individual points-of-fact have been as useful to me as codicils to each programme, so for that:

Ever the pedant, me

[Serial_Apologist]

Oh, I've been watching - and, yes, I wish they'd called this series of individual essays on the relationship between visual Art (mainly) and Cultural identity something else. Taken as such a series, I seem to have got a lot more enjoyment (indeed, "inspiration") from it than you did, RT - but I feel I ought to say that your criticisms and corrections of individual points-of-fact have been as useful to me as codicils to each programme, so for that:

Exactly my own feelings. I thought Schama was more impressive last night than in his earlier episodes, but so was the art he displayed - granted the examples might have been of his choosing? But there was effectively no linkage to civilisations as such; indeed, in these days of non-consensus on just about anything, who should or could have been drawn together to decide on a common brief for the series as a whole? We still don't seem to have been able to come up with a Higgs Boson equivalent to interconnect the disciplines into a coherent Theory of Everything to understand societies of any sort, let alone "civilisations", which as Ghandi famously said when asked about the British one, sound like a good idea. This, in my opinion, is why capitalism and its algorhythmically unchallenged apologists have been allowed by common acquiescence to be the default standardiser. So its back to the post-Structuralists, Walter Benjamin, and Marx and Engels once again...

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Ever the pedant, me

Wrong emoticon!

And if a concern for factual accuracy equates to "pedantry", then count me in. I don't think it does, and my thanks for your pointing out errors were deeply felt and sincere.

[Lat-Literal]

I gave it up mainly because it was being panned. This is arguably the unfortunate side of professional criticism. Gompertz in particular seemed to me to be the leader of the opposition and while he is supposedly BBC that opposition is Sky. It isn't a brand I would wish to vote for, especially as most of the things he/it criticised were more true of the people speaking than what they were commenting on, but their negativism did knock out my vote for any option. I saw Schama on one episode of the BBC's "The Story of the Jews" which was good:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b0392pzx

I think they are different because the 'the 1800s' do not automatically end at 1810, in the way that 'the 1820s' end at 1829 and 'the 1960s' at 1969.

Those last two explicitly refer to to a decade, as 'the 1800s' does not.

I think I agree - and more so.

I was born in the 1950s - specifically in 1962.

Culturally, the 1960s started somewhere between 1965 and 1967 and ended ten years later.

These things vary.

The 1890s, whenever they started, probably didn't extend beyond 1901.

[eighthobstruction]

....Schama in the RT this week writes an article telling us anyone who disagrees with him is wrong.... I have only watched the David olusoga episodes after 3rd schama.....

[Richard Tarleton]

Thanks for kind words ferney Yes I've read that Schama article Don't get me started on Gompertz (his brother's OK...)

[vinteuil]

Don't get me started on Gompertz (his brother's OK...)

... brother? Or second cousin??

.

[Lat-Literal]

Exactly my own feelings. I thought Schama was more impressive last night than in his earlier episodes, but so was the art he displayed - granted the examples might have been of his choosing? But there was effectively no linkage to civilisations as such; indeed, in these days of non-consensus on just about anything, who should or could have been drawn together to decide on a common brief for the series as a whole? We still don't seem to have been able to come up with a Higgs Boson equivalent to interconnect the disciplines into a coherent Theory of Everything to understand societies of any sort, let alone "civilisations", which as Ghandi famously said when asked about the British one, sound like a good idea. This, in my opinion, is why capitalism and its algorhythmically unchallenged apologists have been allowed by common acquiescence to be the default standardiser. So its back to the post-Structuralists, Walter Benjamin, and Marx and Engels once again...

The tower block would have been a very good place to start.

Structuralism v New Brutalism - are ethics and aesthetics divisible?

Collapsing insulae - did Grenfell designers learn nothing from Augustus?

From Bovis to Brezhnev - was Keith Joseph, in essence, a Soviet?

[eighthobstruction]

The tower block would have been a very good place to start.

Structuralism v New Brutalism - are ethics and aesthetics divisible?

Collapsing insulae - did Grenfell designers learn nothing from Augustus?

From Bovis to Brezhnev - was Keith Joseph, in essence, a Soviet?

....indeed indeed....Joseph a very charitable promoting chap apparently....with 'some' interesting but diametrical views it seems....

[Richard Tarleton]

... brother? Or second cousin??

.

Ah!