1. REWINDING TO CIVILISATION'S GLORY
Let’s fast backward to the 1960s. Kenneth Clark - gentle, eloquent, with a cork-tipped cigarette in hand, clambering over rocks on an Ionian beach in clothes fit for the City of London - reminded a postwar Britain of its cultural inheritance. His television series Civilisation ( a thirteen episode series recorded in 1969, watch episode one here) began with the bold idea that art tells the truest story of who we are.
Clark quotes John Ruskin, who said that among words, deeds, and art, it is art that stands as the most reliable testament to a nation’s character. Not the art of elites or museum showpieces, but the art that emerges from the connected soul of a people, our feelings and preoccupations.
2. WHAT DOES OUR ART SAY TODAY?
So what would Ruskin see if he walked through today’s culture? Not soaring cathedrals or visions of the divine, rhat's for sure.
Instead, we get:
- Banksy’s Dismaland – Mickey Mouse cries and Cinderella lies dead in a crashed carriage... he's mostly about the mockery of consumer dreams
- BLM street murals – bold and defiant, transient (where are rhey today?) protest, etched onto the streets
- Internet memes – Wojak "Everything is fine", the NPC Non-Playable Character (NPCs are background characters in video games you can't control. They follow scripts, show no free will, and repeat pre-written dialogue). All rhat post-ironic nihilistic disillusionment stuff ... You either believe the propaganda or you mock it so much that you end up half-believing it, because there's nothing else to believe in, no more heroes, no more values.
- A 15-metre mural of Greta Thunberg – submerged in climate anxiety, up to her neck in rising water
You wouldn't call this uplifting, it's about struggle and despair in the midst of abundance, the artist talking for the protesters as much as the NPCs.
3. FROM GLORY TO GRIEF
What once inspired our greatest works was the glory of God. What inspires today's artists seems to be struggle, cynicism, despair....is rhat how you - looking out at the world today - feel? Well this is your art.
In Clark’s world, beauty was in sacred proportions.
- The chateaux of the Loire Valley
- The grace of Chartres, Notre-Dame, or Florence’s Duomo
- A civilisation, a people, striving toward something higher, celebrating the glory of God.
Today? You don't see much of that today. Instead, we have global expanses of glass and concrete. We no longer celebrate our civilisation with art. We criticise it, and often with the ugliest works we can dream up.
Still, there is a modern day Louvre, but it's not in Europe, it's in the middle east. The Louvre Abu Dhabi seeks "to modernise while honouring heritage". In other words, build on the past, rather than destroy ourselves.
4. THE NEW SYMBOL OF THE WEST
And if there’s one object that captures what we are today, it’s not the cross, not a dome, it’s the water cannon. Wheeled out to meet protest, unrest, the rage of a discontented citizenry, it's all about containment - kettling, containment and state control.
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5. POSTSCRIPT
What Clark began with Bach and Michelangelo, we’ve answered with graffiti and memes. But Ruskin wasn’t wrong. Our art still tells the truth. It tells us the West is in crisis. It tells us that in a way we’ve lost the script... will we find a new story worth carving in stone? Or will our civilisation fade from memory?
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
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