Lesson 3 - Collings - Civilization

Matthew Collings explores civilization and art in this video. "Civilization is what we do to not just be our basic, absolute, tight driven selves, it's the higher route. It's people teaching each other through objects of monuments they leave for future generations. They're talking in signs and marvels. It is what history books can't show us. It is what other civilizations yearn for: what can we be if we are better than ourselves?"

What I like about this video is its consistency with visiting Italy and focusing on the start-ups in Italy, but it also moves to France and gives us a change of scenery.

What was interesting that was said was the posed question; What is god? The answer: He is an abstraction, he stands for our higher values. With the follow up: Do we need him anymore? "It is not god that will make us civilized. It is us, our own humanity and our feelings is our guide to the good" This is interesting because it leads into the theme of this video and the description of the works of the two painters who we focus on.

People I found interesting in this video were Goya and David and what they did for civilization in modern art. As they lived through the explosion of the French Revolution and it's fall out, they experienced the chain reaction of it and the rise of the philosophical idea of the human individual and what they had as opposed to God: human feeling. With this philosophical idea in mind, these two painters depicted a startling world of human emotion.




Pictures above: Goya (right) and David (left)