Mimi wrote:
It’s been absolutely panned in every review I’ve read. We watched the first episode last night, and though, yes, it does weave about quite a bit, and I think we jumped about 40,000 years forwards at one point, it is full of pretty things, and I like pretty things.
I watched the second one yesterday over the Iplayer and really enjoyed it. Unlike the opener there was definitely more of an argument and thread to the 'essay'. Mary Beard does poke a little bit of fun at Lord Clarke in it, but that's good. Discussions about art should be a conversation.
Quote:
I saw a whole collection of the fertility goddesses at the British Museum once and they absolutely hit me hard as just something so POWERFUL. I can’t explsin it, but I think it must have been a similar surge of feeling something meaningful that people sense when they think they e had a religious experience.
I love it when that happens. My guilty secret is that I tend to find galleries boring (music and architecture are always more my thing), but once I realised it was better to go around aimlessly and find something that grabs you, rather than dutifully looking at each picture in each room and reading all the labels, I started to get a heck of a lot more out of these trips.
I remember being really grabbed in the Louvre by a large mosaic from the court of King Darius. Saw the Mona Lisa from a distance, as the crowds were more interesting than the portrait. Wasn't expecting to be so blown away by the 'Raft of the Medusa', given that I've seen it in prints many times and it's a key part of a Julian Barnes book, but hey, I was.
I must dig out my 'Ascent of Man' DVDs and re-watch that, thinking about it.