How Art Made the World is a 5-week program on PBS - showing right now - on the expansive significance and influence of art and creativity on society over the ages. From the write-up:
Dr. Nigel Spivey [an art historian at Cambridge] takes viewers on a quest to comprehend mankind's unique capacity to understand and explain the world through artistic symbols. Speaking in colorful, non-technical language and aided by state-of-the-art computer graphics, Spivey explores the latest thinking by historians, neuroscientists and psychologists regarding the deep-seated and universal human desire to create art...Combining aspects of history, archeology, forensics, sociology and aesthetics, Spivey leads an extraordinary video expedition that spans 100,000 years and five continents: from the vast galleries of prehistoric art in the caves...to the pop culture and advertising imagery that bombards us in the digital age.
"The essential premise of the show," says Spivey, "is that of all the defining characteristics of humanity as a species, none is more basic than the inclination to make art. Great apes will smear paint on canvas if they are given brushes and shown how, but they do not instinctively produce art any more than parrots produce conversation. We humans are alone in developing the capacity for symbolic imagery." In fact, scientists have found growing evidence that our brains are "hardwired" for art and that the shapes, colors and structures inherent in art originate deep within our collective psyche. The series uses the latest research to investigate the biological, social and political forces behind major artistic movements of the past. Spivey then demonstrates how these great turning points in art have reverberated through the centuries to define the visual landscape we now inhabit.
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