How Art Made the World
| How Art Made the World | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Documentary |
| Presented by | Nigel Spivey |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of series | 1 |
| No. of episodes | 5 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Kim Thomas |
| Producer(s) | Mark Hedgecoe |
| Running time | 60 minutes |
| Distributor | BBC |
| Release | |
| Original network | BBC One |
| Original release | 26 June – 24 July 2005 |
How Art Made The World is a 2005 five-part BBC One documentary series, with each episode looking at the influence of art on the current day situation of our society.
The essential premise of the show, according to Nigel Spivey, is that of all the defining characteristics of humanity as a species, none is more basic than the inclination to make art. Great apes will smear paint on canvas if they are given brushes and shown how, but they do not instinctively produce art any more than parrots produce conversation. We humans are alone in developing the capacity for symbolic imagery.
Images dominate our lives. They tell us how to behave, even how to feel. They mould and define us. But why do these images, the pictures, symbols and the art we see around us every day, have such a powerful hold on us? The answer lies not here in our time but thousands of years ago. Because when our ancient ancestors first created the images that made sense of their world, they produced a visual legacy which has helped to shape our own.
In this series we'll be travelling around the globe, discovering the world's most stunning treasures. We'll see how the struggles of early artists led to the triumphs of the world's great civilisations. Our journey will take us through a hundred thousand years of history. We'll be witnessing some of the extraordinary ceremonies of the world's oldest artistic cultures. And we'll reveal how they unlock the deepest secrets of ancient art, We'll be hearing from the people who made these discoveries. And we'll be using science to uncover how thousands of years ago the human mind drove us to create astonishing images, You'll never look at our world the same way again, for this is the epic story of how we humans made art and how art made us human.
The first episode asks why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are so unrealistic.
The fact is people rarely create images of the body that are realistic. What's going on? Why is our world so dominated by images of the body that are so unrealistic?
Dr. Spive begins his investigation by travelling to Willendorf, where in 1908 three Austrian archaeologists discovered the Venus of Willendorf, an 11 cm (4.3 in) high statuette of a female figure, estimated to have been made between 24,000 and 22,000 BCE. Spivey travels to the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna to examine the Venus's grotesquely exaggerated breasts and abdomen, as well as its lack of arms and face, which shows the desire to exaggerate dates back to the very first images of the human body created by our ancestors. Spivey speculates that, The people who made this statue lived in a harsh ice-age environment where features of fatness and fertility would have been highly desirable, and several similar statuettes collectively referred to as Venus figurines show that this exaggerated body image continued for millennia.
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