Product Description

This is Civilisation is a book of analysis: it asks how does art work, what is it saying, what do we want from it, how does it
tell us what we are? In four provocative essays, we go from
the ancient Greeks to the present day, from statues standing around outside temples, beside graves, at cross roads and in religious sanctuaries, to a Chinese conceptual art-photographer staging a modern apocalypse in a studio in Beijing. We see different jostling realities, we encounter religions and revolutions, and we meet awkward, driven individuals whose resolutions to conflicts and dramas of their own time - distant, strange, disturbing - created the foundations for what seems familiar, natural and inevitable today. Matthew Collings's take combines expertise with experiment. He is both learned and chancy. If you want to be appalled, you can be, but if you want to be moved and surprised, you can get some of that too.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #112012 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-31
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

About the Author
Matthew Collings is an artist and writer. He is the author of several books about art including Blimey, It Hurts and Art Crazy Nation,
all published by 21. He has written and presented a number of TV
series for Channel 4, including This is Modern Art, which won a BAFTA amongst other awards. This is Civilisation is a greatly expanded version of the TV series of the same name, written and presented by Matthew Collings, which was shown on Channel 4 in 2007.

Customer Reviews

TOP MARKS FOR MR COLLINGS!!!
Any slight reservations I've ever had about Collings's writing and overly affable presenting style soon evaporated with this fine T.V series and wonderful book. It manages to successfully overhaul and revamp Clark's version.

In this book he skilfully splices his personal experiences and observations along side the overriding chronological devlopment of art. These provide nice little refreshing intervals that often amplify the books ideas. He does this without ever giving feeling that he's going off the point.

I like the design of the book. His personal reflections and anecdotes are indented and printed in a slightly lighter tone. The pictures are run quite forcefully next to the text in order to intensify the points he makes, a bit like Berger's Ways of Seeing. And the book makes lots of really great points. He constantly finds angles to clealy illustrate the ways in which art reflects the moral,technical, philosophical, socio-political ideas of its time and ocassionally manages to direct them. On the Enlightenment he compares and contrasts the work of Goya with that of David, whilst this is nothing new he clearly establishes an overview that is very compelling. (His writting on David are more forceful and absorbing than that of Andrew Graham Dixon for example.)

Later he digs up Ruskin and shines some much needed light on some of his better ideas and shows how influentual they were in his time. Collings is convincing in his assertion that they do seem strangely right for now.

As a writter he is frequently astute in his insights, frank, funny and always willfully easy to read. He constantly manages to bring the text to life, perhaps because after seeing him on the telly as a reader you can hear his voice in your head. Collings's articles in Modern Painters have for some time now been the best and most refreshing thing about it~his much needed debunking of Hodgkin came at a time when the apalling blandishments about his work were pilled knee deep. Similarly his evaluation of the state of modern visaul art is insightful, correct and funny. John Tusa also managed this nicely in Art Matters but without being quite so involved in the minutia.

Anyone with a curiosity in arts' historical contexts who likes to be entertained without ever feeling lectured to will enjoy this book. Collins's knowledge and sense of values and even taste are spot on.

(If he ever had dinner at my house he'd be welcome to eat his asparagus with a knife and fork if he wanted to.)

Read and be civilised.
This is Civilisation

I watched the late Lord Clark deliver his august opinions on the story of western art in the late 1960's. I read the book. Lately, I wondered if this subject would be revisited. Who would have the gall to attempt a similar review? Surely any attempt could not succeed. Then along comes Matthew Collings. A different age, a different style - but it succeeds wonderfully.
Collings' book, an extended version of the excellent Channel Four series, paints a wider landscape, taking in the Classical World and Islamic art. But the same big names are there - Giotto, David, Goya, Turner, and he extends his study to include the contemporary scene.
This is a personal view in the way that Clark's could never be. Collings includes personal narrative to give relief to the main essays.
The great achievement of this book is that Collings shows that art is serious and enjoyable and that anyone can join in. Throughout I felt the presence of John Ruskin who, in his works, implored his contemporaries to 'see'. Ruskin believed that great art was for everyone, and Collings shows how this is relevant for us today.
The book's layout invites this sense of exploration. 'This is Civilisation' is uplifting.

more bread and circuses anyone?
Collings is an odd potato. As a critic, his gently ironic tone (masking a fierce intelligence) seemed perfectly in keeping with the Brit-Art explosion of the late-nineties. The book and TV series 'This is Modern Art' asked all sorts of awkward questions about what art did, what it was and who it was for. Yes, everything still seemed like a garish carnival of moral and aesthetic relativism - but Collings seemed more than happy to lead you through it - avuncular, charming and disarmingly willing to admit to his own worries and foibles.

'This is Civilisation' is in many ways a similar book - Collings doesn't answer the question suggested by the title, rather, he keeps asking it in interesting ways. Ironically, despite the epic scope of the project,this book is a great deal more intimate than anything he's done before. It begins with accounts of of his father's suicide and his mother's mental illness - 'civilisation' in this context implies an enlightened dream of redemption, the embodiment not just of what mankind is, but what it could be. Collings admits a parallel fascination with the surreal, the jarring and the disturbing - the yang to the enlightenment ying.

For the most part, Collings follows the classic western narrative through Greek classicism to Modernism (interposing arabic art) - though this is in no way pretending to be as comprehensive an overview as Kenneth Clark's study (or E.H. Gombrich's seminal 'History of Art').

He also presents a series of personal vignettes, mostly accounts of his adventures in the contemporary art world. The bemused flaneur of 'This is Modern Art' returns, deliciously opinionated, almost pitying in his assessment of the hyper-commercial world of the international art trade.

There's all sorts of engagement and provocation along the way - it's a testament to Colling's intelligence that he still manages to find new things to say about Greek and early Christian art. A notable high-point is his excellent consideration of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood - humanist social values that we could well do with today. There is a little repetition from earlier books - though I thoroughly enjoyed his return to Goya. In fact it's Goya's sleep of reason that seems to triumph in the end - the overwhelming tone of the book is one of disillusionment.

It's not that Collings has ceased to find anything to enjoy in the contemporary art world (though it's noticable that craft and application are generally more important to him now than ideas), but there is a sense that the world is disappearing up it's own wotsit and there isn't much anyone can do about it, except worry about what opinion to have over dinner. Of course, this is more or less the message we queue up to be told over and over again at each exhibition of new art, so we've only got ourselves to blame........