Conlin concludes by reflecting on the subsequent presentation of the history of art on television. He focuses on series which follow Civilisation’s model, inasmuch as they show an auteur leading the viewer on a personal journey, in the course of which works of art and architecture are used to exemplify something about human society and aesthetic achievement. None of them has had Civilisation’s scope, and four or six episodes has become the norm, with all the constraints that implies. Conlin finds John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New clever but reductive. He dislikes Nigel Spivey’s How Art Made the World because its urge to use science to explain the artistic impulse is so strong that ‘individual expression, agency or choice almost threatens to disappear’. He dislikes even more the flashy demystifying psychologising peddled by Simon Schama’s Power of Art. It is Neil MacGregor, Sister Wendy Beckett and Matthew Collings who, for Conlin, have struck something closer to Clark’s note, with its confidence that beautiful works of great art, produced by individuals of rare genius, can be a source of hope and enlightenment.

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