The Power of Simon Schama

I've seen a few episodes of the BBC series The Power of Art on PBS over the last couple of years, and I've always really liked them. The host is Simon Schama, whose books I admire, and who seems to be generally quite a smart and eloquent guy. Recently, I got the DVD set from the library and sat down to watch the entire series. I'm a little disappointed.

There's only a little criticism in each hour-long show, with the rest made up of dramatic recreations and arty video of the work in question. And the criticism isn't always very interesting: Turner's didactic painting about the slave trade is "his greatest triumph in the sculptural carving of space"; Guernica shows that "the world’s horror comes from the dark pit of our psyche". And on David's Death of Marat: "You can’t doubt that it’s a solid gold masterpiece, but that’s to separate it from the appalling moment of its creation, the French Revolution." There's a lot of hyperbole and dime-store psychoanalysis here, amongst the genuinely educational bits about the process of creating a masterpiece.

Schama is often inspiring, and always witty, as in his dry commentary on The Ecstasy of St. Theresa:

"What Bernini’s managed to make tangible is something that we all, if we’re honest, know we hunger for, but before which we’re properly tongue-tied. Something that has produced more bad writing, more excruciating moments of bad cinema, more appalling poems than anything else."

He's is at his best when describing personal experiences--like his first exposure to Mark Rothko's work:

“One morning in the spring of 1970, I went into the Tate Gallery and took a wrong, right turn and there they were, lying in wait. No, it wasn’t love at first sight. Rothko had insisted that the lighting be kept almost pretentiously low. It was like going into the cinema, expectation in the dimness. Something in there was throbbing steadily, pulsing like the inside of a body part, all crimson and purple. I felt I was being pulled through those black lines to some mysterious place in the universe."

The broad strokes make this passage seem like real personal truth--unedited memories of his experience as a 20 year old student. But still, I'm left wanting more. Art has power, OK, but the power to do what, exactly? Why are these particular works masterpieces, and not others? What ties them all together? I know this program wasn't intended to be academic, and it never claims to be a comprehensive look at art history--there's only so much you can do in a miniseries, after all--but I felt a little let down. Of course, maybe the BBC is working on The Power of Art II: Masterclass. I'd totally Bittorrent that.