Civilisations

First: the title. This is a ludicrous title for the series, because it is actually about art alone, and completely ignores all other aspects of civilisations - the science, mathematics and technology that makes civilisation possible; how they rise and fall; and even why they exist at all. Remains of Homo sapiens have been found which have been dated to around 300,000 years ago, but there were no civilisations until the last 10,000 years ago. This needs to be explained!

Also, it describes cave paintings which were created tens of thousands of years before civilisation, so they should be irrelevant if the title of the series actually has any meaning.

This criticism applies to Clark's series "Civilisation", but this new series, while similar, is far more incoherent, with several presenters instead of one, no structure, and claims made without any evidence: "These hand stencils do what nearly all art that would follow would aspire to. Firstly, they want to be seen by others. And then they want to endure beyond the life of the maker."

I would recommend the viewer to watch it with muted sound because visually it is great, but the commentary is distracting and adds little.

While visually I enjoyed this series, the hosts have very strong personal opinions, that often are exaggerated or unfair. They are pushing their own agenda too far. I especially found myself, in the episodes hosted by David Olusoga, having to mute the sound and just enjoy the art itself. His negativity, prejudices, obvious hate of the Western people's, and strong personal opinions repulsed me. He's somewhat unprofessional in fact!

I had huge hope for this series. I did not even read IMDB reviews before giving it a try on Netflix. As episode by episode i gave chances my hope were increasingly lost until I felt forced to write a review here. Civilization is not just visual art. Civilization is mostly human development over time based on different factors. Technology forms a backbone here. Agriculture was the first steps towards creating modern civilization because it forced us hunter gatherers to settle down. Harnessing sun, Wind, water became other factors. Art too is an important parameter but where are other sources of art like music or folks stories or mythical creatures? Given the sheer presence of science and technology here I would give only one chapter to art when it comes to civilization. There are simply so many things that could have taken especially the water and the importance it plays in civilization. This series did came pretty close when it talked about Yangtze river in one episode but did not go down further. This series was mostly obsessed with European visual arts. There was a whole episode on dome. My question during that time was where is pagoda? Pagoda was to east as dome was to west. But it was not even mentioned. Utter disappointment.

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? This documentary explained first two question which are where do we come from and what are we. However, it avoids the most important one, where are we going. Our human being writes down history, not for fun, it's for our children know the idea of what happened and what should be. We always want to keep our children away from danger, like tell them do not eat the red mushroom because it has poison. But if we only wrote the book and told them how beautiful the red mushroom is, they will pay the price which is their life, then learn.

I've often imagined I'd like the chance of offering up my personal version of history on television; what a history of art? Art is not so simply to reduce to a straightforward narrative, so this is a bold project for co-presenters Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga. And it's very heartening to see that the BBC hasn't tried to dumb down their commentary. In other BBC programmes I've seen Beard idiotically reciting Caesar's speaches in modern day Rome, and Schama presenting a fairly convetional wisdom; but here we get their true intellectual insights, and if in places the series is pretentious it's also hard to watch without genuinely learning something. 'Civilisations' has been contrasted to Kenneth Clark's famous series with almost the same title from 60 years previously, but without the latter's Euro-centric bias: to it's credit, though, it never feels to be taking cheap pot-shots at Europe, but rather puts Europe's acheivements (and failures) quite properly in their global context. This is the sort of programme that almost no-one but the BBC could make, and that even the BBC barely makes any more. In the age of YouTube, watch it while you can.