Civilizations DVD

We streamed this and found it enthralling. It raises intriguing questions, provides plenty of interesting information and is visually stimulating.

It is not a simple step to think of this produced and conceptualized program as a bit of a revolution in the formal discipline of art historybut I will brave that path from my small perch. It presents to us histories (and the plural I use here is quite intentional) specific to a placeand placesand to a timeand times. A grand global lattice comprised of artistic creations and inspirations acro cultures and societies not addreed in, and drawn together, by historisizing but by a truer ( or more truthful) consideration of complex sources and inspirations driving artistic creation. And that is (in the sense of historys etymological origins: as a learned enquiry explored through seeing) depiction rendered in and through the context (locally, of place and self) of visions that are shared between societal, political, economic, and environmental changes and upheavals in motion by people/artists separated by signal distances and sociocultural/political evolutions. This is NOT the art history narrative that has been conventionally taught in academia in decades pastin fact it literally blew my minds educated mental mindsetan established false reference deep in my intellect. This productions genius is, to my mind, in no small measure due to the great minds of its primary writer/presentersthe brilliant and iconoclastic claicist Mary Beard and art historian Maya Jasanoff, historians Simon Shama and David Olusoga.Civilizations is a stand-out archival survey and narrative of our humanity linked deeply and far beyond the rhetoric of paradigms and prejudice that has too-long been the progenitor of art historical academic education.

Excellent, eclectic, photography. Great organization and writing. Difficult to fault, except for occasional super-poetic flights of descriptions of basis impulses of the artists. Overly romantic ideas of why they did this or that, and what the artists were trying to express.