Simon Schama’s final edition of Civilisations (BBC Two) went out with a bang. Notably when it came to the work of Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, who creates art through the incendiary interaction of gunpowder and paint pigment.
The ethereal images that Cai made specially for the film were a series high point. As was Cai’s seeming artistic humility. His process (“This is God’s work, his space and his dimension for creation… it cannot be replicated”) was refreshingly devoid of ego in a contemporary arts climate that often seems to celebrate the artistic personality as much as the work itself.
Whether art is simply a Sunday afternoon distraction nowadays or retains its capacity to serve a higher purpose was the principal focus of this film, in which Schama questioned the modernist dictum that anything can be art so long as it is presented as art. In a world where art regularly takes on the character of the disposable, can it still represent that “vital spark” of humanity?
Schama’s answer, unsurprisingly, was a resounding yes. Many will have felt that he made his case conclusively at the very outset of the programme when he visited the former Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic.
There he celebrated an exhibition of 4,500 drawings made by Jewish children incarcerated in the camp – both as a momentary escape from horror, for them, and as proof that the memory of their lives “remains inextinguishable” despite the Nazis’ ambitions. It was a good argument and a moving piece of television.