How Art Made the World
Nigel Spivey
BBC Books £20, pp288
Faust - an academic nerd who suffered from the itchy syndrome identified by Nigel Spivey as 'cloisterphobia' - begged the Devil to rescue him from obscurity and to satisfy his grosser cravings. These days, diabolical conjuring is not necessary. Faust simply prays for a phone call from the BBC, offering a television series. Celebrity is sure to follow, plus a puffed-up quota of air miles.
The Devil used to drive a hard bargain, demanding souls in exchange for his spurious gifts. We no longer believe in eternal damnation; the contract now merely asks for the surrender of intellectual integrity.
Nigel Spivey, the Cambridge classicist who is currently fronting How Art Made the World each Monday on BBC2, is the latest to sign his name in blood. His series relies on visual vagrancy and glossy superficiality to get through its so-called 'history of humankind'. On paper, the endeavour looks shakier, but it begins promisingly. For a while, Spivey - helped out, as he acknowledges, by anthropologists such as David Lewis-Williams and Clifford Geertz - really does seem to be delving into the origins of our unique aptitude for making images.
Everything depends, it turns out, on the evolutionary quirk of our wide-set thumb, which, with our triple-phalanged fingers, enables us to grip a pen. The same talent, of course, also ensures that Homo sapiens is a dab hand with weapons. The art that makes the world is just as adept at unmaking it.
But Spivey's inquiry into the fabric of civilisation soon falters, and he proves unable to make good the boast of his title. Subsequent chapters give up trying to show how art made the world, and are content to watch art ficklely representing a world that already exists. A section on political propaganda extends from the deifying of tribal leaders to the advertising campaigns relied on by contemporary politicians. A long and episodic survey of our obsession with landscape never quite manages to demonstrate that - as Wilde crisply put in his commentary on London's Whistlerian nocturnal fogs - man creates nature.
Bright ideas expire as hunches, never properly elaborated. Why doesn't Spivey relate the Greek worship of a 'divine presence' embodied in statuesque effigies to the flagrant pin-ups of singers, film stars and footballers peddled in our society? The Phoenician temples of Astarte employed sacred prostitutes who offered worshippers the chance of carnal union with the goddess. How different is it to imagine oneself In Bed With Madonna?
Before such connections can be made, Spivey has moved on, rushing for the next plane. The series visits 40 countries, though these hurried stop-overs leave the reader dazed and disoriented. Logic gives way to the factitious visual connection known to the script-writers as a 'segue'. A detour to Easter Island, in the section on art and necrology, leads Spivey to hop sideways to South America, which is, as he says while totting up those frequent-flyer rewards, 'over... 2,200 miles away'.
Often the associative leaps bend over backwards. 'The travels of Herodotus,' says Spivey as he justifies an abrupt trip from Greece to Nepal, 'did not take him as far as the Indian subcontinent.' Although Spivey's own magic carpet manages the transition instantaneously, the journey on which it takes him is not cultural history but art-historical tourism. He is always travelling; even so, he gets nowhere. Any narrative impulse is frustrated by his short attention span, and by his constant recourse to boxy side-bars which briskly deal with matters he has not been able to incorporate in the main story he is telling.
And who exactly are the harried aesthetic pilgrims Spivey addresses? The BBC must have warned him that its licence-fee payers are morons, since we need to be told that Plato is 'the Greek philosopher' or that Picasso is 'arguably the most illustrious artist of the twentieth century'.
During an ill-advised publicity campaign, Spivey mentioned two models which he hoped to emulate and surpass. One was The Story of Art, the bulging book by EH Gombrich that we all read at school; the other was Civilisation, Kenneth Clark's personal account of the European heritage, commissioned by the BBC in the late 1960s.
A side-bar devoted to Gombrich reveals how little Spivey actually values him. He first pays tribute to The Story of Art by saying that it has sold more than six million copies, then scurrilously adds that it was 'dictated to a secretary over just six weeks'. The Eurocentric Clark is reproached throughout How Art Made the World by Spivey's globe-trotting.
But Clark at least confined himself to cultures he understood, and would hardly have announced - as Spivey does in another side-bar about the story-telling of the Australian aborigines - that the guttural chants of the Aranda clan-group near Alice Springs are 'poetry to match Homer'. Clark, it's true, condescended to television, and tried to redeem its vulgarity. Still, I find it easier to suffer his elegant hauteur than to tolerate Spivey's flattery of the medium, which prompts him to liken the continuous narrative that spirals around Trajan's Column to a television documentary.
I suppose his eager gratitude is heartfelt. His book doesn't tell us much about how art made the world, but it certainly shows how television made Nigel Spivey. Or - remembering Faust - do I mean how it destroyed him?
